


Sher Trek: Amok Sign

by CaresaToland



Series: Sher Trek Pilot Miniseries [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Actually Mind Rimming, Alternate Universe - Sherlock (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Episode: s02e05 Amok Time, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Mind Meld, Mind Palace, Mutual Pining, No More Pining, Oh God Yes, Oral Sex, Requited Love, Rimming, Slash (but you knew that), Topping Vulcan Style, Topping from the Bottom, Treklock, Vulcan Biology, Vulcan Culture, Vulcan Mind Melds, miniseriesapril2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2018-10-30 17:11:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 59,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10881297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaresaToland/pseuds/CaresaToland
Summary: Driven by irresistible biological impulses, Mr. Sh’lok must return to Vulcan to claim the mate destined for him since childhood --or die. For his friend’s sake, John risks his command and his life… and gets more in return than he bargained for.Please notethat despite its "Explicit" rating, the first five chapters of this fic (the Teaser and Acts 1 through 4) contain no material more mature than the "Teen and up" / PG-13 level. The Explicit tag refers to the final chapter, "Act Five," only, due to the presence of material concerning sex between two very,veryconsenting Starfleet officers.Please check the tags should you have any concerns.





	1. TEASER

_Captain_ _’s personal log, Stardate (_ whatever _the hell it is, ask me if I care at the moment!). I can’t believe that a couple of months ago I thought it was a big deal to be complaining about wanting some shore leave. Since then our patrol schedule has become easily twice as busy as it was before, and the ship and the crew are getting to the point where they live just for the quiet times in between leaving at one planet and arriving at the next. It shouldn’t be like this, but sometimes it just gets this way and there’s sweet FA you can do about it._

 _We are presently_ en route _to Altair VI for the ceremonies surrounding the inauguration of their new planetary president, having_ finally _finished the godawful inquest and debrief hearings following the destruction of Commodore Matt Decker’s ship and crew… truly a terrible and traumatic business for everybody involved. Everybody aboard_ Enterprise _came away from the situation feeling raw around the edges after having to relive it all at the inquest. Particularly me. And of course_ I _was the one who had to sound stoic and calm all through it, while also having to do everything possible to avoid looking like I was blaming Decker for where he messed up. After ten days of_ that, _the prospect of standing around mindlessly hour after hour in dress uniform (stuck in one of those damn collars that never fit right no matter_ how _many times the Supply computer remeasures you for them) in a sea of politicians and bigwigs begins to look actually restful and attractive. Which by itself is a horrible thought._

 _It’d be idle to try to pretend that all this activity hasn’t been wearing on me. I’ve been tired a lot lately, and Bones has shot me full of vitamin and mineral supplements and exotic enzymes and God knows what else while entertaining himself by making rude comments about my diet. Which are probably all deserved. Because, come on, who’s got time to be thinking “Oh God I really need more fiber” when some bloody giant starship’s turned up and is threatening to blow you to shit, or you’ve got unexpected passengers aboard and one of them’s all of a sudden sneaking around and murdering your crew? Dietary issues really kind of take a back seat. Except for_ some _people. (Bones actually had my duty yeoman bring me a_ salad _the other day. I do try not to curse so much in the Mess, honestly, I know I have to set an example, but_ God _was that pushing the limits.)_

 _But between handling the emergencies and_ then _handling the endless paperwork that comes_ with _the emergencies, I’ve barely had time to draw breath lately. Even when I’m just trying to walk around from one place to another and do my rounds like a normal human being, people keep stopping me in the corridor and saying “Got a minute?” I keep wanting to say “Yeah, and I was going to use it to take a piss in…” And it seems like there just aren’t enough minutes to get everything done that has to be. But at the end of the day it’s the ship that counts. My bladder can wait…_

 

* * *

 

John had decided this morning that it was going to be a day when he didn’t use the turbolifts at all. _I need some more exercise,_ he’d been thinking for the last couple of days. Just going down to the gym and sparring with whoever was handy wasn’t doing it for him, and neither were the various static exercise machines that were down there. _Oh for a nice type M planet,_ John thought, _and someplace fairly flat in its temperate zone_ _where you could just run and run and_ run _, straight toward a horizon, no matter how far away that horizon looked…._ But none of the planets they’d visited recently were the kinds of places you wanted to go running. And as for shore leave planets… Hollow laughter. _As if._

John sighed. _Fine. So how about this, then? No lifts for me today. Up and down between the decks the old fashioned way._ It was strange how restful it was, especially the climbing part, when you were going up and down those ladders in the Jeffries tubes. You didn’t have a lot of attention to spare for that idiotic piece of paperwork you just signed off on, or the complaints of one of your department heads whose problems you suspect have more to do with their own short-term emotional turmoil than anything actually wrong with their department (which as far as _you_ can tell has been running like a well oiled machine).

John headed up yet another ladder, having just had a set-to of this sort with the head of Exobiology. John had spent a precious half-hour listening attentively to Lieutenant LeBrun’s concerns about his equipment not being right for the work he and his staff were being asked to do, and about their  workload. When the long peroration was done, John promised to have the equipment situation looked into. But he was privately of the opinion (as he left that meeting and headed for the next, one deck up) that the problems had little to do with the equipment and the workload, and a great deal to do with the (apparently) unsuccessful romantic entanglement in which Lieutenant LeBrun was presently flailing around with one of Mrs. Hudson’s Engineering assistants, Lieutenant Youghal.

By and large John tried hard not to take official notice of the details of such situations unless they adversely affected a person’s on-the-job performance. But sometimes the details fell into your lap regardless, and when that happened John always wound up feeling, not like the Captain of a starship, but the mayor of a heavily armed and warp-capable small town. _Because that’s what we are,_ he thought as he headed up the ladder. _This is the only way we stay sane in space: by having lots of each other to interact with, laugh with, argue with, fall in love with, just plain_ be _with. Though of course some poor sod has to keep them all in order. And that’s me…_

As he came up onto deck six, John was already thinking about the upcoming meeting with the Provisioning department’s head and assistant head—who’d just better have stopped feuding over seniority issues after the talk he’d had with them last week—and making plans for what to do if they hadn’t, when a turbolift door hissed open and shut behind him and a voice said, “Oh, Captain. Got a minute?”

 _Bones,_ John thought, and paused, just the tiniest bit irked at having to be even this much delayed, but all the same glad of anything that would divert him from having to watch Lieutenant Tuson and Ensign Rance pretend not to be glaring at one another. “A minute,” John said.

Lestrade looked relaxed enough, but slightly concerned all the same. “It's Sh’lok. Have you noticed anything strange about him?”

“No, nothing in particular. Why?” Though John wasn’t sure that he was the right person to be asking about that right now. Sh’lok seemed to have gone on a slightly different shift rotation over the last couple of weeks, and he hadn’t been on the Bridge all that often when John was, as well as doing a lot of meditation in the evenings.

“Well,” Lestrade said, “it's nothing I can pinpoint without an examination, but he's become increasingly restive. If he wasn’t a Vulcan, I'd almost say _nervous.”_ He looked a bit bemused. “And for another thing, he's avoiding food. I checked, and he hasn't eaten at all in three days.”

John shook his head. “That just sounds like Mr. Sh’lok in one of his problem-solving phases,” he said, “or when he’s gone contemplative--“ _Which would match up with the meditation schedule, I guess…_ If he’d noticed this kind of thing going on before, it had been in the form of slight  disappointment that the chess board hadn’t been getting what had for a while been its nightly workouts. And truly, John missed Sh’lok’s presence in his off time. But this was what a long mission was like: people cycled in and out of their routines, sometimes purposely so as not to go stale. They had been spending a fair amount of time together during and right after the omicron Ceti business: who knew, maybe a Vulcan needed to pull away a little after something that intense. _We’ll get back to it, I’m sure—_

John was opening his mouth to say something else when he realised that Lestrade had suddenly been distracted by something, or more properly, someone: by Dr. Hooper, who was making her way along the corridor in their direction carrying a tray with a lidded bowl on it.

“Doctor Hooper,” Lestrade said to her, in one of those we’re-about-to-have-a-discussion-about-something-you’d-rather-not voices that John knew all too well (having last heard it over that salad).

“Ah,” she said, “Doctor Lestrade—”

As Hooper made her way back to him, John started back down the hall again toward the Provisioning department head’s office, assuming that Lestrade had said whatever piece he felt he needed to for the moment. But, “Captain—” Lestrade said, catching his eye: he wasn’t done.

Resigned, John headed back and nodded at Dr. Hooper, who was looking a bit uncomfortable. In fact, she was blushing. _What on Earth’s_ this _about,_ John thought.

Lestrade’s attention was on the bowl. “What’s this?”

“Oh—” Dr. Hooper said, sounding very unwilling to get into it.

Lestrade lifted the lid off the bowl, sniffed appreciatively. “Vulcan plomeek soup! You made this?”

“Ah,” Dr. Hooper said, and went pinker. “Well, Mr. Sh’lok hasn't been eating, Doctor, and I, I just happened to notice…”

Lestrade gave her a look that was dry, but gentle. “You don’t give up hoping, do you,” he said. “Never mind. Carry on, Doctor.”

She nodded to both of them with slightly awkward dignity and turned away to head a few doors back down the corridor, to Sh’lok’s quarters. Dr. Hooper pressed the buzzer, and the door slid open for her. She vanished inside.

John sighed, as Dr. Hooper’s ongoing unrequited feelings toward his First Officer were no more news to him than they were to most of the rest of the crew. Though he felt for her, the situation was otherwise none of his business. “Bones, I'm a busy man….”

“John,” Lestrade said, “when I suggested to Sh’lok that it was time for his routine check-up, your ‘logical, unemotional’ First Officer turned to me and said, ‘You will cease to pry into my personal matters, Doctor, or I shall certainly _break your neck.’”_

John’s eyebrows went up, not just at Lestrade’s Sh’lok imitation, which was (unsurprisingly) pitch-perfect, but at the content. _“Sh’lok_ said that?”

Whatever answer Lestrade was about to make was lost in the sound of a voice shouting _“What is this?!”_ At which point the door to Sh’lok’s quarters flew open, Dr. Hooper (with a faint shriek) fairly flew out of it, and the bowl of plomeek soup, lid and all, flew out the door right after her and crashed into the opposite wall hard enough to leave a dent.

John and Lestrade exchanged an astonished glance as the shocked Dr. Hooper pressed herself up against the wall beside Sh’lok’s door, theoretically out of the way of further flying housewares. “Poking and prying!” came another shout. “If I want anything from you, _I’ll ask for it!”_

And there was Sh’lok in the doorway glaring at Dr. Hooper, his face coldly furious in a way John couldn’t recall _ever_ having seen before. It took a moment for Sh’lok to realise that the hall was full of people frozen in amazement at the sight of a Vulcan _yelling_ at someone and chucking food about… _this_ Vulcan in particular. It took him a fraction of a second longer to realise that two of those people were _Enterprise’s_ Chief Medical Officer and her Captain.

Sh’lok’s face smoothed down—but not very much. His eyes locked on John’s. “Captain,” Sh’lok said, his voice tight with evident anger, “I should like to request a leave of absence on my home planet. On our present course you can divert to Vulcan with a loss of but two point eight light days.”

John stood there astonished and perplexed, extremely annoyed at having been a witness to this… and also becoming increasingly concerned. He stepped toward Sh’lok’s door. “Sh’lok,” he said, “what the hell is this all about?”

Sh’lok’s eyes narrowed. Far from trying to contain his anger at all, it was getting more evident by the moment. “I have made my request, Captain,” he said. “All I require from you is that you answer it, _‘yes’ or ‘no!’”_

For a moment John was so astounded he couldn’t do a thing but gaze at Sh’lok in disbelief. And when no answer was forthcoming, Sh’lok backed into his quarters and the door shut right in John’s face…leaving him standing there and thinking in complete consternation:

 _What—the_ fuck _—was_ that?

(Run titles)


	2. ACT ONE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John has words with his First Officer; and Lestrade has words with _him._

The list of actions that John would not tolerate from his crew under any circumstances was fairly short. Pretty much at the top of its rules-of-conduct section were the routinely intertwined behaviours of disrespect and insubordination. John had seen commanders of other vessels who’d nod and wink at either or both except under extreme circumstances—sometimes under the guise of being friendly with their crews, sometimes because they hated the stress of being seen as bad guys. But in John’s opinion both sets of behaviour always led to trouble sooner or later if not dealt with immediately and directly… and doubly so if the display had happened in front of other people. Any of his crew who snapped at a superior officer in public would quickly find themselves dealing with a very cranky Captain.

But this… _this_ was Sh’lok: normally reserved, often downright reticent… _All right, not particularly reticent when he’s being brilliant in the pursuit of his duties._ He could and would excoriate you with your own ‘stupidity,’ then, no question. But even though the truth came first for him, he’d go out of his way to be polite when he was explaining to you exactly _how_ you were being stupid. And if after that you ignored Sh’lok’s advice and ordered him to do something that went against it, he would simply nod and accept the command without further comment (until later, when it was all over and you were both in private). Sh’lok did not abuse officers of lower rank nor speak disrespectfully to those who were higher.

_Except just now._

John knew instantly what he had to do next—not just in spite of it being Sh’lok who was involved, but _because_ of it. Having spent no more than two seconds staring at that suddenly-shut door to Sh’lok’s quarters, he turned and said to everyone within earshot, “As you were, ladies and gentlemen. Carry on.”

His tone of voice alone was enough to clear the corridor. Once he was alone, John took a breath and went in.

Sh’lok was standing more or less at parade rest by his desk, waiting. His face was more still than it had been a few moments before, but his expression was astonishingly angry—a kind of open anger that John was still racking his brain to find a like for, and coming up empty. He needed to get to the bottom of this, and in a hurry. “All right, Sh’lok,” he said—and if  John’s voice was sharp with his annoyance, surely that was understandable at the moment— “let's have it.”

Sh’lok would not meet John’s eyes, which was unusual. When he spoke, his voice still had that angry edge to it. “It is undignified,” Sh’lok said, “for a woman to play servant to a man who is not hers. I did not r—”

“I'm more interested in your request for shore leave,” John said. “In all the years—”

“You have my request, Captain. _Will you grant it or not?”_

John was gobsmacked all over again, not to mention indignant. _Interrupting me??_ _“In all the years,”_ John said, letting a bit more of his own annoyance out now, “that you’ve been in Starfleet, I know perfectly well that you’ve never asked for a leave of any sort. In fact, you've _refused_ them. Repeatedly. Why now?”

“Captain, surely I have enough leave time accumulated—”

“Agreed, but that isn't the question, is it?”

Sh’lok flicked just the briefest glance at his Captain, and for just that fraction of a second John thought he caught sight of something that looked like shame or pain or both. That quick gesture Sh’lok immediately turned into part of turning away to sit down behind his desk. John wasn’t going to make an issue of that, despite being in the middle of a dressing-down. It was rare enough that Sh’lok unbent with John when they were in situations that had to do specifically with their relationship as officers.

When Sh’lok was sitting John came close enough to lean on the monitor on his desk. “If there's a problem of some sort,” he said, trying again, “illness in the family—”

“No,” Sh’lok said. “Nothing of that nature, Captain.” His gaze dropped to the desk he was sitting behind, and stayed there.

John was trying hard to give Sh’lok a chance to explain, but getting nowhere. _It’s not my job to be the only one working on sorting this out,_ he thought, feeling a bit nettled. _All right—_ He turned and headed for the door. “Then since we're headed for Altair Six, and since the shore facilities there are excellent—”

“ _No_!” And it was a shout again, not just angry but urgent enough that John was stopped short by it. He turned to see Sh’lok shoot up out of his chair again, his eyes once more flashing with anger. “I must—”

Sh’lok caught himself and fell silent as John’s eyes narrowed at him. But there was that flash of pain again, and also of something deeper that John wasn’t able to identify.  He stood there for a few seconds silently watching Sh’lok, with an effort, master himself. “I _wish_ ,” Sh’lok corrected himself, and in a much more appropriate tone, “to take my leave on Vulcan.”

 _And since when does he need to make an_ effort _to control himself?_ John thought. _Normally it’s all anybody can do to get him to loosen up a little…_

Slowly he went over to stand by Sh’lok, looked up into his face. For a moment he didn’t speak, as he tucked his arms behind himself and gave his First Officer a moment more to volunteer something.

But nothing was forthcoming. Sh’lok stood there mute.

 _This isn’t right,_ John thought. “Sh’lok,” John said more quietly, “I'm asking you. _What's wrong?”_

“I need—rest,” Sh’lok said. Followed by a long pause; a hesitation, actually. “I'm asking you to accept that answer.”

John stood silent for a moment or two, thinking, _This isn’t just some out-of-control crewman. This is_ Sh’lok…

He turned to the monitor on Sh’lok’s desk, hit the comm button. “Bridge,” he said. “Helm.”

“Dimmock here, Captain.”

“Alter course to Vulcan,” John said. “Increase speed to warp four.”

“Aye, sir.”

John clicked the comm button off, straightened. _This is going to cause all kinds of trouble with Starfleet,_ he thought. _But how many times has this man saved my life, now? He’s worth some trouble. More than some._

Sh’lok was facing away from him, still staring fixedly toward the door, and John found himself wishing he’d turn back toward him. But it didn’t look as if it was going to happen, so he headed for the door himself.

“Thank you, Captain,” said the deep voice from behind him.

John looked back at Sh’lok with slight relief. The moment of stress seemed to have passed, enough for John to feel comfortable smiling a little. “I suppose,” he said, “most of us overlook the fact that even Vulcans aren't indestructible.”

He nodded slightly to Sh’lok, hit the door control and headed out, thinking again about the meeting he was now ten minutes late for.

It had to be his imagination that behind him he heard Sh’lok say, “No. We’re not…”

* * *

_Captain's log, stardate 3372.7. On course, on schedule, bound for Altair Six via Vulcan. First Officer Sh’lok seems to be under stress. He has requested and been granted shore leave. Ship’s surgeon Lestrade has him under medical surveillance…_

_Captain’s personal log, dated as above: I hate having to be weaselly about how I word my official log entries. But these get logged automatically, and the last thing I want to do at this particular moment in time is give Starfleet any heads up on exactly where Sh'lok’s shore leave is, or give them any more reason than necessary to start connecting the dots between our present destination and anything that might be going on with Sh'lok. The odds are good that they won’t notice for a while, as Starfleet bureaucracy’s so huge that often enough one part of it doesn’t talk to other parts for days and days at a time. They’ll find out what’s going on soon enough, and I’ll explain it all to them, and everything will be fine._

_I hope…_

* * *

The next morning John made sure to be on the Bridge early, as he wanted to see how Sh'lok looked when he came on shift. The Vulcan looked a bit wooden, but that wasn’t at all unusual early in the day when he’d been meditating the whole evening before. It seemed sometimes to John that it took Sh'lok a while to settle back into dealing with humans after having spent a good number of hours breathing in the cool clear air of Vulcan rationality. _Well_ , John thought, _I’m happy enough to give him the time he needs._

He’d been up looking over some slightly dodgy readings at the Environment station and was making his way back around the upper circle of the Bridge when Donovan turned toward him as John was passing her station.” Captain,” she said as she was putting in her earpiece, “something's coming in on the Starfleet channel. Priority and urgent, sir.”

 _Oh God,_ John thought, _now what? Just as things were getting quiet…_ “Put it on audio over here, Lieutenant.” He stepped down to the center seat.

Donovan nodded. “Message complete, sir. Switching over.”

The message was automated, as the bulk of _Enterprise’s_ communications with Starfleet Command were on any given day. It was spoken by one of the _almost_ -perfect-but-not-quite machine-generated voices that the messaging computers at Starfleet produced— the order’s content doubtless excerpted from some memo or communiqué circulating higher up in the command chain. “To Captain USS _Enterprise_ from Starfleet Sector Nine. Inauguration ceremonies, Altair Six—”

 _Oh shit,_ John thought, his glance immediately going over to Sh'lok, who had stood up a little straighter from his reviewer to listen. “—have been advanced seven solar days. You are ordered to alter your flight plan to accommodate. By order of Komack, Admiral, Starfleet Command. Acknowledge.”

John let out an annoyed breath. “Lieutenant Donovan, acknowledge that message.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Mr. Bradstreet,” John said, “compute course and speed necessary for compliance.”

Bradstreet touched a couple of controls on the Helm console and then looked over his shoulder at John. “We'll have to head directly there at, ah—warp six, sir. Insufficient time to stop off at Vulcan.”

 _Damn it all! I try to do this one thing for him when he says he needs it, and then this._ “Head directly for Altair Six,” John said as he stepped away from the center seat and made his way up to Sh'lok’s station, standing next to him.

“Sailor's luck, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, as lightly as he could when he was feeling so annoyed. “Or, as one of Finagle's Laws puts it, ‘Any home port the ship makes will be somebody else’s, not mine…’” He shrugged. “The new president of Altair Six wants to get himself launched a week early, so we have to be there a week early.”

Sh'lok was not looking at him—rather, gazing in the general direction of the viewscreen as if trying not to see anything at all, his face for the moment an unreadable mask. “Don't worry,” John said. “I'll see that you get your leave as soon as we're finished.”

“I quite understand, Captain,” Sh'lok said, his voice soft but the tone abstracted, as if his mind was somewhere else. _Disappointment_ , John thought, _being concealed?_ But he immediately rejected the thought. Sh’lok’s concealments were normally a lot more effective.

He went back down to the center seat and started thinking.

* * *

 It took until his midshift break, when John went to stretch out briefly in his quarters to let the inevitable tension-ache in his back ease off, before he was able to find his way past the quandary in which Starfleet’s new orders had left him. _This is ridiculous,_ he found himself thinking. _There has to be a way to work around this. There has to…_

One option had kept occurring to him, and he’d pushed it away several times. But he could find nothing better. Finally John rolled up onto one elbow and reached out for the screen by the bed. “Bridge,” he said. “Navigation.”

“Navigation,” said Bradstreet immediately.

“Mr. Bradstreet,” John said, “how late will we arrive for the ceremonies if we increase speed to maximum and divert to Vulcan just long enough to drop off Mr. Sh’lok?”

Bradstreet looked a bit perplexed. “I don't understand, Captain.”

 _Not like him to be quite so slow on the uptake,_ John thought, _but who am I to throw rocks? Took_ me _long enough to come up with this, let alone decide to do it._ “How far behind schedule will diverting to Vulcan put us?”

“But we are on course for Vulcan, Captain,” Bradstreet said. “As Mr. Sh’lok ordered.” He looked actively confused now, as there would be normally be no way that John wouldn’t know about that… the assumption being that the order was originally his.

_Normally._

John kept his face absolutely still. “Thank you, Mr. Bradstreet. Watson out.” He clicked the screen’s comms button off.

Minutes later, after making another call, he was on the Bridge. Or, more accurately, he was standing in the open turbolift door, hands on hips, looking at the Science station, where a Vulcan was peering down his viewer at something. 

“Mr. Sh'lok,” John said quietly. “Come with me, please.”

Sh’lok straightened slowly and went to him. The lift doors shut them in.

John reached out for the lift’s controller handle. “Deck five,” he said, glancing at Sh’lok’s face. At first glance it seemed as impassive as ever, but John knew him too well to be fooled; there was a dazed quality to Sh’lok at the moment, something not quite right in those pale eyes.

He looked away, unwilling to stare. “You've changed course for Vulcan, Mr. Sh’lok. Why?”

“Changed the course?” Sh’lok said, very low. He looked as if he’d been taken by surprise: not by what John had said, but by the content of the statement.

“Do you deny it?” John said.

“No,” Sh’lok said after a second. “No, by no means, Captain. It is quite possible.”

Not just the dulled look, but the uncertainty, from the man who was certain about _everything_ —and the uncertainty about something he _himself_ had done— John was completely thrown by it. “Then why'd you do it?”

”Captain, I accept on your word that I did it,” Sh’lok said, “but I do not know why, nor do I r-remember doing it.”

At the sound of his First Officer actually _stammering_ , it was as if red-alert sirens started going off inside John’s head. The turbolift stopped as it reached deck five, the doors hissed open, but John couldn’t  look away as Sh’lok turned toward him.

“Captain,” Sh’lok said, urgent, “lock me away. I do not wish to be seen. I c-cannot—no Vulcan could explain further!”

Sh’lok was actually _trembling._ The profound concern that John had felt during Sh’lok’s initial outburst at his quarters was washing over him again, more strongly than before.

“I'm trying to help you, Sh’lok,” John said as quietly as he could.

“Ask me no further questions,” Sh’lok said, and there was a hint of that anger again, but held down for the moment… just barely. “I will not answer!”

John got a sense of someone caught between conflicting imperatives, trapped there… and in torment. Most carefully, though, he kept any reaction to this off his face. Whether that attempt at concealment would even have worked normally—when he would have been dealing with the most observant being in Starfleet—wasn’t the question at the moment. In any case, he looked away a little. “I order you,” John said, “to report to the Sickbay.”

In his peripheral vision John saw an expression of sudden horror fleet across Sh'lok’s face, wiped away a second later. “Sickbay?” whispered the man whom John knew hated unnecessary repetition more than almost anything.

“Complete examination,” John said as if not noticing at all, and glanced back at him. “Lestrade's waiting.”

Sh’lok took a moment to register this, then stepped out and turned back toward John. On the Vulcan’s face was an expression of mute anguish, as if at some inexplicable betrayal.

The lift doors shut between them. John rubbed at his face with one hand. _Oh God_ , he thought, _what the hell is_ wrong _with him?_

* * *

So unsettled by the conversation in the lift was he that John found he needed to just go walkabout for half an hour or so to recover, stopping in at several departments that  were easily at the bottom of his present go-see-them list (if in fact they’d been on it to begin with), and as a result confusing everybody. In Botany he even somehow managed to get into a brief altercation with Mr. Dimmock’s normally sweet-tempered _Terrestrius manus_ specimen. The hand plant first flailed its bright furry pink self frantically at John on his approach, hissing at him, and then retreated into its pot… most likely having picked up on John’s mood.  _I’m no good to anybody right now,_ John thought as he took himself out of there, _not even plants. I should just get the hell offside and go do paperwork or something._

However, having left the Bridge under such peculiar and possibly concerning circumstances—for he’d seen the very covert glances as he and Sh’lok left—John felt compelled to put in an appearance up there. No sooner did he arrive (or attempt to) than he found himself getting stuck in the open turbolift discussing the continuing misbehavior of the left nacelle’s antimatter converter with Mrs. Hudson, who was on her way down to her own domain. If there was any upside to this it was overhearing a conversation between Dimmock and Bradstreet that he probably never would have heard about otherwise: Dimmock’s resigned “How do you figure it? First we're going to Vulcan, then we're going to Altair. Then we're headed to Vulcan again. And now we're headed back to Altair…” And Bradstreet, dry and succinct as always: “I think I'm going to get space sick.”

But finally Mrs. Hudson let him go, and John was able to walk round the place once and visit all the stations. At the end of it, though, he looked at the center seat and just couldn’t feel that he’d be able to settle there for any length of time. _Because settled is what I am not. Decidedly._ “Mr. Dimmock,” he said at last, “I’ll be in my quarters.”

“Aye, sir.”

And back John went to shut himself in and sit down behind his desk—where he could at least be unsettled in private, rather than inflicting it on everybody else. There he immersed himself in the paperwork that he never, ever got caught up on. The immersion had its desired effect. It took his mind off his own immediate worries (by reminding him of a whole different set of them) and deadened his brain somewhat.

So that when his door buzzer went and Lestrade came in and stood in front of his desk and said, “John, you've got to get Sh’lok to Vulcan—”, John was actually able to say, “Bones, I will, I will...” He threw the stylus down on the padd he’d been writing on and got up to stretch (or to escape the strangling tentacles of bureacracy). “As soon as this mission is over we’ll—”

 _“No!”_ Lestrade said, and actually seized him by the arm and turned John back toward him. _“Now._ Right away! If you don't get him to Vulcan within a week, eight days at the outside, he'll die.”

John stared in utter shock, going cold all over, as Lestrade shook him by that arm. _“He'll die, John!”_


	3. ACT TWO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A number of difficult conversations take place. 
> 
> Also: a course is laid in for Vulcan. Then for Altair. Then for Vulcan. Then for Altair again. Miraculously, no one gets space sick.

John stood staring at him, feeling as dazed as Sh’lok had looked. _“Why_ must he die? Why within eight days? _Explain!”_

Lestrade looked unhappy. “I don't know.”

John found he was having to command himself not to shout at his CMO as if he was some erring ensign. “You keep saying that! Are you a doctor, or aren't you?”

Lestrade frowned back, but there was no anger in it—or if there was, it wasn’t at John. “There’s a growing imbalance in Sh’lok’s bodily functions,” Lestrade said, “as if in our bodies huge amounts of adrenalin were constantly being pumped into our bloodstreams. Now, I can't track down the cause in my biocomps. And Sh’lok won't tell me what it is. But if it isn't stopped somehow, the physical and emotional pressures will simply kill him. Stroke, most likely. Massive heart attack. Major organ damage. Possibly all three at once—” He shook his head. “I can prevent a lot of things, John, and cure a fair number. Even the occasional rainy day. But this is a whole bloody hurricane we’re talking about. And within a matter of days _something_ , or a bunch of somethings, will go wrong with him that I won’t be able to fix fast enough to keep him from dying on the table.”

John stood there in shock. “He did his level best to keep me from finding out, too,” Lestrade said. “Even though he was sick as a dog at the time, shaking like a leaf. Came wandering into Sickbay like he wasn’t even sure where he was or why he was there. Then he pulled it together enough to try some of his damn Vulcan regs-lawyer stuff on me. ‘My orders were to report to Sickbay, Doctor—’”

Again the perfect Sh’lok imitation, not nearly as amusing as it had been earlier in the day. “‘I have done so,’ says he. ‘And now that I have, I will return to my quarters.’” Lestrade snorted. “I told him _I_ had some damn orders too. Had to invoke both you _and_ logic to get him on the damn biobed. Finally he lays himself down there and mutters ‘Examine me, for all the good it’ll do either of us.’” Lestrade scowled, ran a hand through his hair. “He had _that_ right, anyway. Nearly had a cardiac of my own when I saw his blood pressure. I mean, seriously, John, he _had_ one. His neurotransmitters are all over the place, his reflexes are in tatters… even his muscle mass is down five percent just from his last routine scan a month or so back. Only that iron constitution of his, and his God damned _stubbornness_ about doing his bloody job, has kept him on his feet and functioning this long. He’s a mess.” Bones rubbed his eyes. “And not long for this world if something’s not done right quick.”

John shook his head and swallowed, his insides already starting to tie themselves in knots. “You say you're convinced he knows what’s causing this?”

“He does,” Lestrade said. “But he's being as tightlipped about it as an Aldebaran shellmouth.”

John turned and headed for the door.

“No use to ask him, John,” Lestrade said as it hissed aside for him. “He won't talk.”

 _We’ll see about that,_ John thought.

* * *

 

John pressed the buzzer outside Sh’lok’s door. “Come,” said the voice inside the room.

John went in. Sh’lok was sitting behind his desk, apparently having been viewing something on his monitor or making notes on the nearby padd. As John entered he began to stand.

“Stay,” John said, waving Sh’lok back into his seat.

Sh’lok sat back down and folded his hands in his lap, staring at them like a schoolboy expecting a scolding. John, coming around to the front of his desk, stood there a moment in silence, wishing there was some kinder way to go forward with this… but he couldn’t think of one. Finally he simply said, “Lestrade has given me his medical evaluation of your condition. He says you're going to die unless something is done. _What?”_

Silent, Sh’lok lifted his eyes to John’s for a moment. There was a bleak, resigned desperation in them that John found amazingly hard to look at, but he wasn’t allowed more than a second or so to do so before Sh’lok dropped his gaze to his hands again.

“Is it something only your planet can do for you?” John said.

Sh’lok didn’t answer—just reached out with one hand for the stylus lying on the nearby padd, picked it up.

One _shaking_ hand. The sight of it trembling, that large strong long-fingered hand—always so graceful and until now always so certain and capable—went through John’s chest as painfully as if he’d been stabbed. “Sh’lok!” he said, and almost without John’s volition his own hand shot out to grasp Sh’lok by the wrist, to hold it, to try to steady the shaking.

After a strained second Sh’lok pulled himself out of John’s grip. Across John’s mind there instantly flashed that moment with the chess board between them, how long ago now?— _too long!_ —when hands had touched and not pulled away. Anger flared in him, and an odd pain that he didn’t have time right now to track to its source.

For the moment he retreated into safer territory, that of the commanding officer dealing with one of his people. “You've been called the best First Officer in the Fleet,” John said, his voice rough with the discomfort of the moment. “That's an enormous asset to me. If I have to lose that First Officer, I want to know _why!_ ”

Sh’lok looked at him, looked away. After a second he got up and walked a short distance to the entry of the partly-screened, red-curtained area of his quarters that held his bed and his meditation space. He leaned against the doorway there, his back to John. “It is a thing no out-worlder may know,” Sh’lok said softly, “except those very few who have been involved. A Vulcan understands, but even we do not speak of it among ourselves. It is a deeply personal thing.” Finally he looked back toward John. “Can you see that, Captain, and understand?”

 _Not if sparing your feelings is going to leave me staring at your corpse in a week,_ John thought. “No,” he said as evenly as he could, “I do not understand. Explain. …And consider that an order.”

Sh’lok looked down and away. “Captain, there are some things which transcend even the discipline of the service—!”

To hear him say such a thing was shocking. But as upsetting in its way was that tone, that tension again, suggestive of someone trapped between a pair of equally unavoidable and equally dangerous alternatives: someone with no safe way to turn, no help to be found.

Slowly John stepped over to stand across the doorway from him. “Would it help if I told you that I'll treat this as totally confidential?”

Sh’lok raised his eyes and met John’s for just a moment, searching. Then he turned away, moving a short way back into the main room, and settled himself into an uncomfortable-looking sort of parade rest, hands clasped behind his back.

“It has to do with…” Sh’lok muttered something so softly that John couldn’t hear.

“What?” John said.

“Biology,” Sh’lok said a little more loudly.

Slowly and casually, as if trying not to frighten a creature he was trying to get closer to, John moved to stand side by side with Sh’lok, matching his parade rest with one of his own. “…What kind of biology?”

 _“Vulcan_ biology,” Sh’lok said, the emphasis he added to the word suggesting that speaking the phrase at all was causing him near-physical pain… and adding the blatant subtext _I cannot_ believe _you’re so dim as not to get what I’m talking about here._

“You mean the biology _of_ Vulcans?” John said.

Sh’lok nodded, not meeting his eye.

“Biology as in… reproduction?”

Sh’lok’s gaze dropped to the floor. Just the slightest nod followed… and he actually _blushed._

John felt Sh’lok’s embarrassment so acutely that he started to go hot himself. _Oh no, no way, absolutely not,_ he thought. He straightened his back and chose a tone of voice intended to frame the subject of discussion, for this moment at least, as quite the normal thing. “Well, there's no need to be embarrassed about it, Mr. Sh’lok,” he said. “It happens to the birds and the bees…”

Sh’lok actually sighed, one of those sighs that John knew from experience meant _You are unquestionably an idiot but nonetheless I will humour you for the moment._ “Captain, I am filled with admiration for bees,” Sh’lok said, “as they are fascinating creatures whose complexities not even centuries of research have fully revealed. And as regards birds, I am sure they possess many sterling qualities.” An eyeroll that said _not that I even slightly care what those might be_ managed to manifest itself at that point. Even in the midst of all this distress and pain and fear, John was more than glad to see at least a hint that the day-to-day Sh’lok he knew was in there still. 

“But they are not _Vulcans,_ Captain,” Sh’lok said, and turned away, moving back toward the doorway of his sleeping quarters. “If they were—” He turned toward John again. “If any creature as proudly logical as we—were to have their logic _ripped_ from them as this time does to us...”

He stared at the floor again for a moment, apparently having some trouble getting his breath. John waited.

After a moment Sh’lok recovered himself a little and folded his arms. “How do Vulcans choose their mates?” he said, glancing over at John. “Haven't you wondered?”

Sometimes… over the chess board, or on the Bridge, or in his quarters quite late at night… yes, John had wondered. But this was absolutely not the time or the place to get into that. “I guess the rest of us assume that it's done quite…” He finally came down on the word that went more or less automatically with “Vulcan.” “…Quite logically.”

Behind him Sh’lok moved quietly over to his desk, sat down again. “No,” he said after a moment. “It is not. We shield it… with ritual and custom shrouded in antiquity.” He shook his head, breathed out in frustration as if at a loss how to explain. “You humans have no conception. It strips one’s life away… one’s Work, one’s _mind_.” And he shuddered.

John stood silent, profoundly moved not only by Sh’lok’s willingness to speak about this with him at all but by the sudden sense of the word “work” acquiring a capital letter… and of the concept itself being treated with the kind of reverence that most beings reserved for their deities.  Sh’lok, meanwhile, had bowed his head again as if gathering strength for something.

“It brings a madness, this time,” Sh’lok said after a moment, “which rips away our veneer of civilisation. It is the _pon farr._ The time of mating.”

John went slowly to sit down in the chair on the near side of Sh’lok’s desk. On the far side, Sh’lok had laced his fingers together tightly enough so that the knuckles stood out pale. “There are numerous precedents in nature, Captain,” he said. “The giant eel birds of Regulus Five; once each eleven years they must return to the caverns where they hatched. On your Earth, the salmon. They must return to that one stream where they were born, to spawn… or die in trying.”

John looked across the desk at him, met his eyes. “But you're not a fish, Mr. Sh’lok. You're—”

“No,” Sh’lok said. “Nor am I a man. I'm a Vulcan.” He swallowed. “I'd hoped I would be spared this by the uniqueness of my genetic makeup. Even at the price that must be paid for it: for to be unique is to be alone.” A pang went through John at the casual way Sh’lok said that, like someone speaking casually, almost dismissively, of an old irremediable pain. _The way I talk about the leg when it bothers me sometimes…_

“But the ancient drives are too strong,” Sh’lok said, shaking his head slightly, as if at his own obtuseness. “Eventually, they catch up with us, and we are driven by forces we cannot control… to return home, and take a mate.” His voice dropped to the point where it almost couldn’t be heard. “…Or die.”

Quietly John got up to move around to the other side of Sh’lok’s desk, to stand by him. Absently he noted the chessboard set up on the shelf-pedestal behind the desk, and how there was something familiar about the way its pieces were set up. But that could wait.

Sh’lok sat silent, his hands still clenched together, his head bowed. “I haven’t heard a word you've said,” said John after a moment. “And I'll get you to Vulcan somehow.”

He turned and made for the door. Just there as it hissed open for him, John paused, realising that the pieces on Sh’lok’s chessboard were set up to mirror the position in which he and John had finished their last game.

John swallowed. “And you’re not alone,” he said as softly as he could. Then he left. 

* * *

 

In the turbolift John hit the comms button to speak to Donovan on the Bridge. “Lieutenant,” he said, “get me Admiral Komack at Starfleet Command, Sector Nine. Pipe it down to Lestrade's office.”

“Starfleet Command,” she said. “Yes, sir.”

“Deck five,” he said to the turbolift, and it headed there. John sighed. His ladders-only plan was going to have to wait for another day. Now he had good reason to hurry places. _And now,_ he thought rather grimly, _we’ll find out if_ Enterprise’s _reputation, which everybody at Fleet’s been going on about until we’re all half dead from overwork, is going to be enough to let me get on with saving Sh’lok’s life._

* * *

 

 Shortly thereafter John was standing behind Lestrade’s desk, not quite at attention but in a most erect and intent parade rest, staring down into the monitor there at the image of Admiral Komack.

He was a tall, white-haired man with a face that since he’d been kicked up into the administrative end of things had gone rather hard, settling into the habitual expression of a man more used to saying “no” than “yes”. And right now, to John’s carefully-concealed dismay, he was fulfilling that expectation. “Captain, you're making a most unusual request…”

“I'm aware of that, sir,” John said, “but it's of the utmost importance. You must give me permission to divert to Vulcan.”

“But you refuse to explain why it is so important.”

“I can't, sir.” _Come on, you bloody fool, help me out here and read between the lines a little. I’m in_ Sickbay, _for fuck’s sake. There’s no_ way _I’d refuse to tell you what’s going except because of a confidentiality issue!_ “But believe me, I wouldn't make such a request—”

“Altair Six is no ordinary matter,” Komack said. “That area is just putting itself together after a long interplanetary conflict. This inauguration will stabilise the entire Altair system. Our appearance there in force is a demonstration of friendship and strength which will cause ripples clear to the Klingon Empire.”

“Sir,” John said, “the delay would be, at most, a _day._ I can hardly believe that—”

Komack’s face, animated for just a second there when discussing interstellar politics, closed down again at the sound of someone having the temerity to keep disagreeing with him when they should have the sense to know which way the wind was blowing. “You will proceed to Altair Six as ordered,” he said. “The subject is closed... you have your orders. Starfleet out.”

And the monitor went dark.

From the other side of his desk, Lestrade looked sadly at John. “Well,” he said. “That’s that.”

“No it’s not,” John said, coming out from behind the desk and starting to pace back and forth in front of the door to the adjoining lab where Dr. Hooper was working. “I know the Altair situation. We would be one of _three_ starships. Very impressive, very diplomatic… but it's simply not that vital.”

“You can’t go off to Vulcan against Starfleet orders!” Lestrade said. “You'll be busted—”

“I can't let Sh’lok die, can I, Bones? And he will if we go to Altair. I owe him my life a dozen times over. Isn't that worth a career?” He stopped his pacing, looked over at Lestrade. “And he's my _friend.”_

John sat down behind the desk, hit the comms button on the monitor. “Bridge. Navigation.”

“Navigation,” came the reply. “Bradstreet.”

“Mr. Bradstreet, lay in a course for Vulcan. Tell Engineering I want warp eight or better. Push her for all she'll take.”

“Course already plotted,” Bradstreet said. “Laying it in, sir.”

John absorbed that for a second, considering one conversation that had already occurred between his helmsman and his navigator, and extrapolating at least one other that might have done. It was also possible that somewhere aboard, currency of one sort or another would shortly be changing hands. “I see,” he said, hearing in the background the door in the lab hissing open and shut. “Very well, Bradstreet; carry on. Watson out.”

He looked up at Lestrade then with a challenging expression, one meant to say, _Well? Got anything to share? Let’s hear it now._

If Lestrade did, he held his peace; and John got up and headed for the Bridge.

* * *

 

The lighting in Sh’lok’s quarters—the rooms’ environmental system having dimmed it down, as no members of any species needing brighter lighting had been present—came up again slowly as that condition changed.

Sh’lok lay still on the bed, on his side, eyes closed, noting this. He had of course no need for the lighting to alert him to that other presence. There were very few crewmen of _Enterprise_ who were able to enter his quarters without him authorising their entry first, and of those, only one of them was female. He had heard her outside his door before she’d even touched it.

Now his hearing told him all he needed to know: soft steps that brought her to stand silently near where he lay, breath that caught and then steadied itself, the faint susurrus of uniform material as an arm reached out… and withdrew.

Sh’lok lay there, unmoving, and considered what to do.

Such rational assessments were becoming increasingly difficult for him. The mental state in which he was presently entrapped by his rebellious transport had been assailing him with contradictory demands for days, and never more so than in the most recent hours. The normally calm and well-ordered architecture of his mind echoed now with shouts, cries, pleas, conjectures: _what is there to lose, everything that matters,_ _tell him while you can, no stay silent, it’s no use, it’s every use, dare to match the other’s daring, give up before you’re rejected!_ To hold equilibrium in the midst of such a vortex of emotion and pain was proving more impossible by the hour.

He’d already destroyed his desk monitor in a fit of the kind of rage that (after the satisfying fact) routinely mortified him as a child. And the thought of that other child’s face he’d looked upon earlier on that monitor—the upsweep of long dark hair, the already perfectly controlled expression (a level of control then already impossible for him, and long since rejected as suboptimal, even though then so greatly desired)…that had only made matters worse. _How will I live though this,_ he’d thought. _And should I even want to?_ _Perhaps death is better. I was an experiment, after all. And not all experiments succeed._

Yet elsewhere others were labouring to keep him alive, thereby conferring value on his life—precarious a thing though that was at the moment—and by so doing, bestowing on him a currency he must find the right way to spend.

 _And here now is another debt come due._ Because whatever of her own desires might make her own life difficult and painful for her, logically he knew this woman to be a good scientist (as human ones went) and an excellent pathologist, passionate about her work and meticulous about the accuracy of her results—often helpful to him not just because it was _him_ she was helping, but because she had her own version of the Work and served it conscientiously. Yes, her personal reactions sometimes interfered, usually because either his physical appearance or his mental acuity affected her emotionally, but after all even John—

He put that thought firmly to one side. This was not the time, and in any case the similarity between the two cases was utterly superficial. Besides, he could hear her moving again, and if he didn’t speak, the moment would be lost. That would be unforgivable when he might actually have relatively few moments left.

“Doctor Hooper,” he said without opening his eyes.

She stopped. “Yes, Mr. Sh’lok,” she said.

Sh’lok sat up and swung himself around so that he was half-sitting on the bed and looking toward her, while searching for the way to handle this situation that would cause her the least pain. “I had a most startling dream,” he said at last. “You were trying to tell me something, but I couldn't hear you.”

He stood, and she started toward him, an almost involuntary movement. Sh’lok held up a hand to stop her. “It would be illogical for us,” he said quietly, “to protest against our natures. Don't you think?”

She looked at him, her concern for him fighting in her with her own pain. “I don't understand,” she said.

That was hardly unexpected, since she was so busy at the moment either pretending to be unaware of the tear rolling down one side of her face, or pretending it simply wasn’t there.

It was courage; and if there was anything Sh’lok knew that it was useless to deny about himself, it was that he had a soft spot for courage. On impulse Sh’lok put a hand out and touched the drop away. “Your face is wet,” he said quietly, as if he had no idea what a tear was. _There,_ he thought. _See that; I too can pretend._

She held herself quite still for a moment or two. “I came to tell you,” Dr. Hooper said, “that we are bound for Vulcan. We'll be there in just a few days.”

He nodded, then looked up at her, resigned. “Vulcan,” he murmured.

She turned away to go.

“Doctor Hooper—”

“My name is Molly,” she said quietly.

“Yes, I know, Molly.” Sh’lok paused. “I want you to know that I’m sorry about the plomeek soup.” He saw her head go up a little with surprise… but then their work had brought them together often enough that she knew how rarely Sh’lok saw any need for those two words in dealing with other sentient beings. “Do you suppose,” he said, having given her a moment or two to get over the shock, “that you might consider making some more?”

She didn’t turn; but he heard just a slight smile come into her voice. “I’d be very glad to do that, Mr. Sh’lok.” And she straightened then, still not turning. “And if there’s anything else I can do, anything you need, anything at all; you have me.”

Sh’lok was perfectly aware of the possible _double entendre,_ but saw that she was ignoring it, speaking in the strength of that sort of forlorn dignity that was uniquely hers. Forlorn it might be: but the dignity was indomitable.

“Thank you,” Sh’lok said. “I will remember.”

Holding herself very straight, Dr. Hooper left. Sh’lok stood there, hands clasped, for some while, gazing sightlessly at the door and considering the nature of human courage, and how best it might be acknowledged.

* * *

 

Two point six days later, _Enterprise_ dropped out of warp just inside Vulcan’s orbit, and John and Lestrade and Sh’lok stepped into a turbolift together.

John reached for the controller as they got in. “Bridge,” he said.

When the doors closed, Sh’lok glanced over at Lestrade. “It is obvious that you have surmised my problem, Doctor,” he said. “My compliments on your insight.”

John saw Lestrade turn his head a little, either to hide a smile he couldn’t conceal, or to hide an expression of shock for being complimented. For his own part, he concentrated on not appearing to notice.

Sh’lok turned to him. “Captain, there is a thing that happens to Vulcans at this time… almost an insanity. Which you would no doubt find distasteful.”

“Will I?” John said with a slight smile. “You've been most patient with my kinds of madness.”

Sh’lok hesitated. “Then—would you beam down to the planet's surface and stand with me? There is a brief ceremony.”

 _Stand with you? I’ll stand with you anywhere,_ was what the back of John’s mind said, with no hesitation at all. But he had to keep his response more restrained: for a starship’s captain, there were inevitably other considerations. _For however_ long _I’m still a captain…_ “Is it permitted?”

“It is my right,” Sh’lok said. “By tradition, the male is accompanied by his closest friends.”

John let the thought of hearing this man actually say that to him, and in front of a witness, sink in deep. “Thank you, Mr. Sh’lok.”

The lift stopped, and its doors opened. Sh’lok turned his head to look at the Doctor. “I also request that Lestrade accompany me.”

Lestrade kept his face a bit grave, but there was no disguising the quiet pleasure in his voice. “I shall be honoured, sir.”

As they entered the Bridge, Donovan looked up at John. “Captain? We're standing by on Vulcan hailing frequencies, sir.”

He nodded, and he and Sh’lok and Lestrade looked toward the screen. “Open the channel, Lieutenant,” John said. “Vulcan Space Central, this is the USS _Enterprise_ requesting permission to assume standard orbit.”

A dry male voice answered. “USS _Enterprise_ from Vulcan Space Central; permission granted. And from all of Vulcan, welcome. Is Commander Sh’lok with you?”

The Vulcan straightened a bit. “This is Sh’lok.”

“Stand by to activate your central viewer, please.”

The turbolift doors hissed open as Dr. Hooper came in and handed Lestrade a padd, then glanced around curiously at the Bridge crew, who were all watching a viewscreen that for the moment was dark. “Doctor, what’s going on?”

Lestrade lifted a finger to his lips and shushed her gently. And then the screen lit up—

With the image of one of the most beautiful Vulcan women John had ever seen. An oval face, high cheekbones, dark hair swept up high, a red, red mouth, and gray-green eyes that at first glance looked cool and unconcerned— But John had some experience in looking at Vulcans at this point, and thought he saw something, not so much passively concealed, but concealing _itself_ under that coolness. _There’s an intensity there,_ he thought, _that could be very…_ engaging _… if it was on your side. But if it_ wasn’t—

“Sh’lok,” the woman said in a voice that at least to Terran ears sounded surprisingly sultry, “it is I.”

“T’Eyreen,” Sh’lok said, “parted from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched; we meet at the appointed place.”

“Sh’lok,” said the woman on the viewscreen, “parted from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched; I await you.”

Donovan was plainly fascinated by the proceedings, and the woman. “She's lovely, Mr. Sh’lok. Who is she?”

“She is T’Eyreen,” Sh’lok said. “My wife.”


	4. ACT THREE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John Watson goes to his best friend's wedding... where things don't go exactly as planned.

As John headed for the Transporter room along with Sh’lok and Lestrade, he found himself wondering how long it would take gossip about the conversation with Vulcan, and Sh'lok’s description of the woman on the screen, to reach every last person aboard _Enterprise._ _Not very long,_ he thought. It was at times like this that the ship’s small-town quality came out most noticeably. _And after this is over_ — _whatever_ this _is going to be_ — _it’s going to be_ days _before anybody aboard this vessel can look at me without that expression on their face that says,_ But what I _really_ want to ask you about is… what happened?

He sighed as the Transporter room doors hissed open for them. Mrs. Hudson herself was behind the controls… no accident, John was sure. She gave him a very innocent look that nonetheless suggested she was expecting to be briefed in full when John got back, and would probably break out one of her collection of Scotch whiskeys to encourage him. All he could do at the moment was waggle his eyebrows at her and get up on one of the pads.

Sh’lok stepped up onto one just behind John and to his right, his usual spot—at his Captain’s side, supporting but ready to take a lead if requested—and Lestrade on the one behind and to the left, with one eye on Sh’lok. John had noticed when they’d met up prior to making their way to the lift that the Doctor was carrying a small medikit (not slung at his side, but belted on, possibly for discretion’s sake) and surmised that he was still quite concerned about Sh’lok’s condition. There was no missing the fact that Sh’lok definitely looked more wan than usual, indeed looked worn down. _But then bearing in mind what he’s been through just getting here…_

Which left John wondering: _after the marriage ceremony,_ then _what?_ What processes would have to take place, physically, for Sh’lok to be restored to health? Bearing in mind what Sh’lok had told him, John had to entertain the thought that it might involve something as crudely _simple_ as—to put it courteously—congress with his ‘wife.’ (And hadn’t _that_ term taken him by surprise. It had certainly caught Dr. Hooper off guard, and even Lestrade had looked briefly unsettled.) John wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.

  _…And_ then _what?_ he thought. Because he had no data to work with. There were plenty of other male Vulcans in Starfleet. It wasn’t like he’d ever heard that any of them had to, for example, resign their commissions after having this happen to them.

 _But were you ever paying any_ attention _to this issue before? It’s not like you ever had a Vulcan XO until now. Or any other Vulcan crew under you, really._

Yet also Sh’lok had said that this wasn’t an issue that would ever have been discussed with anyone else not intimate with his home culture. How many Vulcans in Starfleet simply made sure they had leave well before whenever this was scheduled to happen? And then they went off and did whatever was necessary— 

At which point a horrible thought occurred to John. _How many Vulcans… got caught out by this event while serving on ships where there was nobody they felt they could confide in… and so they just_ died?

John’s mouth went dry with fear. But as it did, another part of his mind said loudly, _Never mind that._ This _isn’t all those other Vulcans. This is_ Sh’lok, _and it is_ not going to happen like that.

…He hoped.

* * *

 

 When the Transporter finished singing in his ears, John looked around him and saw red.

Dark red stone, like sandstone, wind-worn and faintly glittering: light red sand, thick enough on the ground to shift a little underfoot, the surface of it shifting a bit in the wind. It was the combination of all that red sand and dust getting into the air, in particles of just the right size, that caused that astonishing sky rearing up over them—orange enough near the horizon, but shading up to the color of blood—well, his and Lestrade’s blood—near the zenith.

Sh’lok gazed around him with a shuttered expression, gathered up John and Lestrade with a glance, and led them toward a narrow bridge-like structure that reached away across the barren valley beneath them toward a great truncated redstone peak a few hundred meters away. The peak was topped with a thick ring of stone left over from its truncation. The part facing toward them and another bridge on its far side of it was still a solid wall several meters thick, as if someone when this place was built had been concerned about attack from this side and intended to limit access to what lay within.

As they stepped through a great smooth-walled gateway cut into that outer barrier, John could see that the rest of the ring wall had been carved into massive lintel-capped pillars—the pillars themselves smoothed and polished, squared-off and sheer, but the lintels left rough, as if the builders or artisans had been trying to preserve the primitive unworked quality of the stone. _A contrast between civilisation and what came before?_ John thought. There was no telling: Vulcan design aesthetics weren’t exactly something he’d ever studied in depth. 

The three of them paused at the top of a shallow flight of steps leading down into the central space. The glittering sand here was paler, as if brought from somewhere else. In the middle of the space was a single smooth-built pillar with another of the rough-hewn caps, this one jutting out a meter or so over a shallow two-stepped dais of the ubiquitous polished red stone. The dais was made in a six-sided geometrical shape like a hexagon pulled long against one of its axes. The rear of the dais, against the pillar, held what looked like a gently smoking firepit. From the capstone above it there hung a verdigrised bronze gong (at least judging by the hammer that hung nearby), in the same stretched-hexagon form.

John looked around him and saw the long six-sided design recurring around the circle: in another dais across the circle from the central one, and in a bronze plaque near where they stood, from which hung numerous smaller versions of that shape, turning in the hot wind and chiming softly against one another. It was at that point that John realised what had been teasing at the edge of his mind about those shapes. _They’re like the lids of coffins…_

 “This is the land of my family,” Sh’lok said. “It has been held by us for more than two thousand Earth years. This…” He looked around him with what to John was clearly identifiable as unease. “…is our place of _Koon-ut-kal-if-fee.”_

He stepped away and made his way down into the central area, while John and Lestrade came down the stairs onto the paler, more golden sand. “He called it _Koon-ut_ what?” Lestrade said.

“He described it to me as meaning ‘marriage or challenge,’” John said. “In the distant past, Vulcans killed to win their mates.”

Lestrade looked around him and shook his head a little. “And they still go mad at this time. Perhaps it's the price they pay for having no emotions the rest of the time…”

John could think of a few things he might say about that, but for the moment he let it go, looking around at the bleak but beautiful landscape. “It's lovely,” he murmured. “I just wish the breeze was cooler.”

“Yeah,” Lestrade said. “‘Hot as Vulcan’… Now I understand what the phrase means.”

John watched Sh’lok step up onto that central dais and reach up for the greened-bronze hammer hanging beside the gong. _Coffin lids,_ he thought, and then tsked at himself and pushed the thought aside. _No telling what the shape means in this culture, stop being an idiot…_ “The atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s,” he said, as much to finish the thought as to move himself away from the ridiculous image that, once noticed, just kept presenting itself to him.

The somber deep metallic _boom_ of the struck gong pulled John out of his thoughts. “I wonder when his T’Eyreen arrives,” Lestrade said.

Sh’lok had hung the hammer back in its place and stepped down from the dais; now he came toward them. John noted, and was troubled by, the slowness of Sh’lok’s step. Normally he was so full of energy, moving quickly everywhere. _But what he’s been through these last few days has really taken it out of him…_

“The marriage party approaches,” Sh’lok said as he came to stand beside them. “I hear them.”

That didn’t surprise John: there were enough times he’d teased his friend about “those Vulcan ears” and their sharpness (in the sense that had nothing to do with shape). Nonetheless he raised his eyebrows. “Marriage party? You said T’Eyreen was your wife.”

Sh’lok nodded. “By our parents' arrangement,” he said. “A ceremony while we were but seven years of age. Less than a marriage but more than a betrothal. One touches the other in order to feel each other's thoughts--”

His eyes met John’s, and for some reason John felt so uncomfortable that he had to drop his gaze for a moment to get back in control of himself. He thought of sigma Draconis VI and of that hand held up in front of his face, and Sh’lok’s voice saying, _May I?_ And suddenly the thought of anyone else doing that with Sh’lok bothered him, bothered him irrationally, bothered him a _lot—_

But that was ridiculous. John forced himself to look up again… and to his great surprise, found Sh’lok doing the same. _As if he too—_

One more John pushed the thought away. “In this way,” Sh’lok said, “our minds were locked together, so that at the proper time, we would both be drawn to _Koon-ut-kal-if-fee.”_

And there was no missing the bleakness in his eyes. _Like someone trapped between two equally desperate options, and no way out..._ John thought, feeling strangely desolate for a second.

A good distance away—for so the thinner air made it sound—John could hear a soft sound: very small bells, ringing shrilly. But Sh’lok was already moving to the central dais again, reaching for the gong’s bronze mallet. He struck the gong with it, and once again the air shook with the depth of the sound and an unsettling range of high harmonics that shivered down John’s nerves. A second or two later movement caught John’s eye through the far gateway in the ring wall, and he was surprised at how quickly the source of those bells appeared. _The thin air again—_

First through the gate were two silver-helmeted Vulcan men in silver tunics over black leggings. They were shaking greened-bronze frameworks made in that long hexagonal shape, barred across with heavy wire and strung with bells. The first pair of Vulcans turned left on entering, toward the second dais, followed by two more similarly-dressed men supporting between them the poles of something like an open sedan chair.

This struck John as unusual enough by itself, but the realisation of _who_ was sitting in that chair was more than sufficient to widen his eyes. The chair bearers were carrying a tall man who was almost all dressed in black, from his calf-length tunic to his dark-bound leggings, except for a flash of high-collared white undertunic at his long throat and a heavy chain of rectangular silver links around his neck. In the crook of his elbow, almost negligently, he braced a long dark staff, curiously carved so that it looked almost as if folds of cloth were wrapped tight around it. His hair was cut much as Sh’lok’s, but it was smoother and of a dark auburn that caught in itself subdued glints of the somber redness of the stones and sky around them. The man had close-set eyes, strong brows, a long nose, a saturnine mouth. His was the sort of face behind which even someone who didn’t know who he was might suspect a great many secrets were held, smoothly, effortlessly.

But John knew, and couldn’t stop himself from shaking his head slightly in amazement. “Bones,” he said softly. “You know who that is?”

Lestrade shook his head. _“S’kroft,”_ John said. “The only person to ever turn down a seat on the Federation Council.”

“S’kroft,” Lestrade said. _“Really?_ Officiating at Sh’lok's wedding? He never mentioned that his family was _this_ connected to the Vulcan government.”

“ _Connected?”_ John said, and smiled a bit. _“_ As I understand it, that man _is_ the Vulcan government. Not that they’d exactly advertise the fact…”

As the men bearing S’kroft’s chair paced toward the second dais, John’s attention went to the rest of the wedding party, and specifically to the woman who followed immediately behind S’kroft’s chair. It was T’Eyreen, in a short silvery dress, her hair bound up on her head in a complex array of fine silver fillets. John thought he caught her sliding an assessing glance his way, though due to the direction in which she was walking it looked like it might have been an accident. _Except it wasn’t,_ John thought. It might have been only the second time he’d ever laid eyes on her, but the sense of calculation that rolled off the woman was, to John at least, nearly tangible. He got a strong feeling that this was a person who did nothing accidentally…

 _And therefore needs watching,_ something said in the back of his head. John had learned early in his sequence of commands that these impressions, when he got them, were worth paying attention to. He filed that one away and examined the rest of the wedding party.

Behind T’Eyreen came another woman, taller and more strongly and lithely built, in silver tunic over black like the livery of the footmen or guards or whatever they were. She had long red hair that caught even more of the hot red light of the sky in its looped-up coils, along with large eyes, high cheekbones and a pretty rosebud of a mouth. But her expression was set grim, and as she went by she threw Sh’lok a glance that, Vulcan-originated or not, was clearly of the _I’d like to see you leave in a basket_ sort.

 _Now what do we make of that?_ John wondered. _Bridesmaid? Annoyed at not being the bride, maybe? Or what?_ He was out of his depth, and bereft of Sh’lok’s always-present help to fish him out.

And even more, he could have used some context on the man who came after the red-headed woman. He was in a slightly different version of the silver over-tunics worn by the other men—one cut low and square to show off the impressive musculature of his chest. He was carrying a polearm with a long curve of blade down one side of it, like a razor-sharp feather of some steel bird’s wing; and he wore a peculiar sort of cap-and-half-mask that left his eyes uncovered but hid his nose and mouth.

John tensed at that. Cultural differences or not, he knew an executioner when he saw one. He had no idea what the man might be here for, but it was safe to say he didn’t care for the implications. Under the circumstances he didn’t really waste time looking over the last couple of men in the party, who carried wrapped bundles that John was beginning to doubt were wedding presents.

The chair bearers were setting down their burden on the secondary dais, and taking the bearing-poles away. The man in the chair held up his left hand commandingly toward Sh’lok in the Vulcan salute.

Immediately Sh’lok stepped down from the dais, the bronze mallet still in his hand, and went to S’kroft, lifting his own hand parted in salute as he came. He paused just for a moment at the foot of the dais, and then dropped to one knee before S’kroft and bowed his head to him.

S’kroft reached out, the long square-cut pendant sleeves of his tunic unfolding like wings, and carefully, thoughtfully placed his fingers on Sh’lok’s face. Then he changed their position slightly, as if looking for something. John remembered the feeling of fingers on his own face, how the touch itself had seemed to search down into him, to draw him and Sh’lok so intimately together. He swallowed, feeling something cold whisper down his back, as if what was happening here somehow threatened that memory—

The feeling vanished as S’kroft removed his hands and Sh’lok stood up. _Probably just sweat,_ John thought, because it was genuinely _hot_ up here, and the wind wasn’t really helping. 

“Sh’lok,” said the man in the chair in a smooth and silky voice, almost a drawl—if any voice with so posh-sounding an accent could truly be described as drawling. “Are our ceremonies for outworlders?”

“They are not outworlders,” Sh’lok said. “They are my friends.”

Just the slightest arching of eyebrows from the man in the chair.

“I am permitted this,” Sh’lok said, with an almost undetectable touch of the scorn he would normally have poured all over anyone who’d forgotten the facts of a situation with which they really should have been familiar.

S’kroft allowed himself almost exactly the same flicker of an eyeroll, as if the response had been calibrated to match, and raised a hand to regally beckon John and Lestrade over. They glanced at each other, and went; John being aware this time of a glance at them under long lashes from T’Eyreen, one she didn’t attempt to hide. 

John stopped next to Sh’lok where he stood before the dais. “This is Watson,” Sh’lok said. 

John inclined his body slightly to the man in the chair, a gesture he’d used on politicians and potentates before. “Sir.” He straightened.

S’kroft’s gaze caught and held John’s for a moment, almost as if he was looking for something. Wondering what that might be, John met that look and held it in return, as that something-cool crept softly down his spine again.

After a second either S’kroft had or hadn’t found what he was after. In any case he shifted his attention to the doctor. “And thou art called?”

Lestrade bowed a little as well. “Gregory Lestrade, sir,” the doctor said.

S’kroft’s gaze went back to Sh’lok. “Thou nam’st these outworlders ‘friends’. How dost thou pledge their behaviour?”

“With my life, S’kroft,” Sh’lok said. 

John slid his eyes sideways and caught Lestrade’s flicker of surprise at that—and his recognition that in _this_ situation that was almost certainly not just some empty idiom.

S’kroft shifted his gaze back to John and Lestrade. “What thou art about to see,” he said, “comes down from the time of the beginning, without change. This is the Vulcan heart; this is the Vulcan soul. This is our way.” 

He raised an arm and pointed dramatically at the central dais. _“Kah-if-farr!”_

The men with the bell-frames began to shake them. Slowly Sh’lok turned and walked toward the dais, and John watched him go with another wave of concern. Sh’lok appeared to be having trouble breathing; he looked _tired_. And if there was something Sh’lok never seemed to be, it was tired. From time to time he’d go seemingly for days on end without sleep apparently for his own amusement, as if just (it occasionally seemed to John) to annoy Lestrade. _I hope we can get this over with in a hurry so he can do whatever he needs to do to be better… because this is just_ wrong.

Sh’lok reached the dais, mounted its steps. He paused there, lifting the mallet to strike the gong again.

But he didn’t get the chance, because T’Eyreen had swiftly stepped forward from where she’d been standing. She mounted the dais, thrust her hand in a _stop!_ gesture between the mallet and the gong, and cried, _“Kal-if-fee!”_

The bell-shakers stopped.

Sh’lok gave T’Eyreen a long, perplexed glance. After a moment he turned away from her and came down from the dais, looking almost dazed, and making for where S’kroft sat as if to protest. But the half-masked man with the curve-edged blade positioned himself in front of Sh’lok, mutely forbidding him to go any closer.

Sh’lok stopped there, then looked down at the mallet in his hand and dropped it on the sand. Silently he turned and walked away toward the far side of the stone circle as the man with the blade lowered it and rested it pommel-first on the sand.

John turned to S’kroft in alarm. “What is it?” he said. “What happened?”

“She chooses the challenge,” S’kroft said.

“With _him?”_ Lestrade said, at least as alarmed as John, and pointing at the man with the blade.

“He acts only if cowardice is seen,” S’kroft said. “She will choose her champion.”

John glanced around him, concerned. _From one of these people?_ he thought, regarding the various Vulcans who stood around them. There were only the men holding the bell-frames, the ones with the wrapped bundles, the men who’d carried S’kroft’s chair in—and the red-haired woman, whose cold gaze was fastened on Sh’lok where he stood leaning sideways against one of those far pillars. The look in his eyes had gone distant, and his hands were clasped together before his face, the fingers interlaced.

An idea came suddenly to John that he seriously disliked. “Sh’lok?” he said.

But no response came. “Do not attempt to speak with him, Watson,” S’kroft said. “Already he is deep in the _plak-tow,_ the blood fever.”

John swallowed. Sh’lok’s eyes were actually halfway to rolling up in his head, his face gone tight in a rictus of what looked like barely-suppressed fury, and the interlaced fingers clutched together, flexed, clutched again. John thought of how many times he’d seen those fingers steepled in thought, or comfortably laced together as their owner gazed at him across the chessboard, and his guts clenched.

“He will not speak with thee again until he has passed through what is to come,” S’kroft said. “If thou wishest to depart, thou may’st now go.”

 _And leave him alone in the middle of this? Bloody hell no._ John shot a glance at Lestrade, who looked equally concerned but gave John a look that said, _You call it._

“We’ll stay,” John said to S’kroft. And if he let a little of his thought out on his face, an expression along the lines of _What kind of person would walk away from a friend in a situation like this?_ , well, he was only human, after all.

S’kroft regarded them with straight-faced approval. “Sh’lok chose his friends well.”

“Sir,” Lestrade said, “I don't understand. Are you trying to say that she rejected him… that she doesn't want him?”

“He will have to fight for her,” S’kroft said. “It is her right.”

He looked past them at the woman who was now standing calmly before the gong on the central dais. “T’Eyreen,” S’kroft said, “thou hast chosen the _kal-if-fee_ , the challenge. Thou art prepared to become the property of the victor?”

“I am prepared,” she said in that beautiful sultry voice. Its tone added a whole level of _double entendre_ to the words. _Almost certainly unintentional,_ John thought. Nonetheless there was something about it that made his skin crawl—the suggestion that two people were about to fight over her, and that she found that arousing. 

“Sh’lok,” S’kroft said, “dost thou accept the challenge according to our laws and customs?”

The answer was a single nod, all Sh’lok seemed capable of at the moment. T’Eyreen was apparently finished with the covert glances now, and she turned her gaze to the young red-haired woman and let her desires show in her eyes. The redhead met her gaze and matched it, and when her glance flicked back toward Sh’lok again, there was nothing in it but murder.

 _Oh God I was right,_ John thought. Normally he was overjoyed any time he was right around a Vulcan. Today was already turning out to be enough to break him of that forever.

Unnerved, he glanced over at Lestrade. “Think Sh’lok can take her?”

Lestrade glanced at the red-haired woman, then at Sh’lok. “In _his_ condition?” He looked grim. “I checked him over one last time this morning. He’s in terrible shape. And I was expecting what he was in for now was a stroll up the aisle, dammit, not armed combat!” Lestrade winced. “ _You_ could beat him right now, John. In fact for all I know _I_ could beat him. So look at him, and look at her. She’s healthy, she’s rested, she’s prepared… and she’s Vulcan. Can he beat her? _I have doubts.”_

“T’Eyreen,” S’kroft said. “Thou wilt choose thy champion.”

T’Eyreen raked the assembly with what was probably meant to be a look of cool triumph, but John was sure he read excitement there, and had to stop himself from gritting his teeth. She joined her hands over her midriff in a formal manner and stepped gracefully down from the central dais.

The red-haired woman and the executioner moved up to flank her path. “As it was in the dawn of our days,” T’Eyreen said as she came, “as  it is today, as it will be for all tomorrows, I make my choice.” She paused by the red-haired woman, their glances crossing.

Then she moved past her. _“This_ one,” she said.

And T’Eyreen pointed at John.

He was so shocked by this development that he actually found himself  looking around to see who she was _really_ pointing at. But there was no one else. Lestrade, for his part, blinked a couple of times, looking as completely flummoxed as John.

Apparently other parties were confused too; and outraged. The redheaded woman stepped up beside T’Eyreen and glared at S’kroft.  _“No!”_ she said in a clear contralto. _“I_ am to be the one. It was agreed!”

“Be silent, T’Kait,” said S’kroft in a tone that John had heard more than once from high-end superior officers—the sound of someone not at all used to being interrupted or disagreed with.

“Hear me!” T’Kait said. “I have made the ancient claim. I claim the right! This woman is—”

S’kroft was up on his feet. _“Kroykah!”_

The executioner stepped between T’Eyreen and T’Kait, leveling his blade between them. But John found it hard to pay attention when he was being blindsided by a sudden twinge of memory. _What do people usually say?…_

Oblivious to this, S’kroft was gazing narrow-eyed at T’Kait and T’Eyreen alike. T’Eyreen dropped her rebellious gaze to the sand underfoot, and T’Kait drew herself up and visibly smoothed her face to a mask. “I ask forgiveness,” she said, and stepped away toward where she had been standing before…but still quite close behind T’Eyreen. 

John watched this, and glanced back toward S’kroft. “Watson,” he said. “T’Eyreen is within her rights… but our laws and customs are not binding on thee. Thou art free to decline with no harm on thyself.”

S’kroft  rose from his chair with that long dark staff in his hand and stepped down from the secondary dais, making his way to the other, and stepping up to stand where T’Eyreen had stood, in front of the gong. But no sooner had he come there than Sh’lok straightened himself, hands still clasped before him, and slowly walked to him.

He stopped just shy of the dais. “S’kroft,” Sh’lok said, hardly to be heard.

S’kroft stared at him in astonishment. “Thou _speak’st?”_

Sh’lok stood there a little hunched over, his hands still clasped before him, the fingers still working. John could see even from where he stood how white the knuckles were. “My friend,” Sh’lok said, low and hoarse, “does not understand!”

S’kroft was impassive. “The choice has been made, Sh’lok. It is up to him now.”

Sh’lok shook his head. “He does not _know._ I will do what I must, S’kroft, but _not with him!_ His blood does not burn— He is my friend!”

S’kroft’s eyes narrowed. “Some say thy Vulcan blood is thin, Clan-brother. Wilt thou prove them right? Art thou Vulcan, or art thou _human?”_

He said it as if it was an insult, and meant to be so. Sh’lok glared at him from under his brows. When he spoke again, some of its wonted power and some of its proper baritone rumble was back in Sh’lok’s voice, and John’s neck hairs stood up at the sound of it. “I _burn,_ S’kroft,” Sh’lok said. “My eyes—are flame. My _heart_ —is flame. Thou hast the power, S’kroft. In the name of my fathers—forbid. _Forbid!”_

S’kroft simply looked at him, his face still.

“S’kroft,” Sh’lok said, more intensely, more desperately, as if every word he was pushing out was costing him some unspeakable price. “I _plead_ with thee.” Another pause. _“I beg—”_

S’kroft’s face did not move, but something in his eyes shifted toward disappointment. “Thou hast prided thyself on thy Vulcan heritage,” he said. “…It is decided.”

As if at a signal, one of the attendant male Vulcans came forward and fastened a long purple sash, like some ancient memory of a swordbelt, around Sh’lok’s waist. S’kroft moved back a little on the dais, and Sh’lok stepped up to stand beside him, his hands steepled together more openly now, only the fingertips touching.

John couldn’t bear it any more, had to move. He took a few steps  toward the dais, caught S’kroft’s eye. “What happens to Sh’lok if I decline?”

“Another champion will be selected.”

John looked over his shoulder at T’Kait, considering. “Do not interfere, Watson,” S’kroft immediately said, sharp-voiced. “Keep thy place.”

He stood there for a few moments, eyes locked with S’kroft’s, while doing the mental math as to what would happen if “another champion” was selected. Besides T’Kait, the only other apparently available options were big strong-looking Vulcan males who would plainly make mincemeat of Sh’lok in the present circumstances—

The next thing John knew, Lestrade had come up next to him and taken his arm, and was walking him away, back toward the other dais. Behind them the bell-shaking began again, the two Vulcans in charge of that work now walking circles around the central dais. 

John was shaking his head, seeing what was going to happen all too plainly, seeing what his choice was. But Lestrade knew the look on his face all too well by now. “You can’t do it, John!”

“I can’t?”

He suspected that Lestrade also knew that tone from him too well. _“No!_ He said their laws and customs weren’t binding on you.”

“You’ve already said Sh’lok might not be able to handle _her,”_ he said, glancing at T’Kait. “Consider the alternatives.” He jerked his head in the general direction of the male Vulcans present.

Lestrade glanced at them, not looking very happy. “If I can knock Sh’lok out,” John said, “without really hurting him—”

“In _this_ climate?” Lestrade just snorted at him. “If the heat doesn't get you, the thin air will!”

And truly, it was heating up here: the wind was blowing hotter, and the firepit at the rear of the dais was beginning to flare with occasional smoke and flame as the attendants continued their ceremonial march. “God, the bells,” Lestrade muttered. “I’d give real money if they’d shut up.” He turned to John again. “Come on, John, you can't do this!”

“Look,” John said, wiping the sweat off his forehead. “If I get into any trouble, I'll quit. Then Sh’lok wins, and honour is satisfied!”

Lestrade looked as if he thought it wasn’t going to be that simple. “John, listen, if you—”

“Bones,” John said. “He’s my First Officer. _And my friend_. I  disregarded Starfleet orders to bring him here. And another thing—” He gestured at the dais, and the dark man standing there, leaning on his long dark staff, watching them. “That’s _S’kroft of Vulcan._ All of Vulcan in one package. How can I walk away from this? How can I possibly back out in front of _him?”_

Abruptly the bells stopped.

“It is done,” S’kroft said. Off to one side, John saw T’Eyreen’s gaze drop to the sand again as she smiled a small smile of triumph, sure she knew what was going to happen next. 

“Watson,” S’kroft said, bending his dark gaze on John, “it is time for thee to choose.”

It would be pleasure enough to see that superior little smirk wiped off T'Eyreen's face, but John had far, far better reasons for what he was going to do. He stepped forward and met S’kroft’s eyes.

“I accept the challenge,” he said.

He had no idea what T’Eyreen might be doing behind him, and right this second he couldn’t care. What was troubling John right now was the sight of Sh’lok’s narrowed eyes gone glassy with a rage that was blanking out everything else he was. There seemed to be nothing in there right now but anger. And the thought of Sh’lok trapped and helpless inside himself, all that massive intellect pinioned and struggling under the weight of his vengeful transport’s demands, was well nigh unbearable. _But it can’t last,_ John thought. _It won’t last. All I have to do is get us both through this somehow. Get this over with, so he can be all right again—_

 “Here begins the act of combat for possession of the woman T’Eyreen,” S’kroft said. “As it was at the time of the beginning, so it is now. Bring forth the _lirpa.”_

The two liveried Vulcans carrying the long purple-wrapped bundles stepped forward. One knelt before the dais and set down his bundle, unwrapping it: another knelt before John and did the same.

John watched the Vulcan before the dais lift out the object that had been wrapped up. It was a polearm of sorts, with one end terminating in a wicked-looking sharpened half-moon of steel, the other ending in a broad heavily-counterweighted half-egg shape. The Vulcan offered the weapon to Sh’lok.

John saw the quick sure grip with which Sh’lok reached out to grasp the weapon with those long, strong, capable hands. A second later he lifted his gaze at last to glare across at John from under his brows. Those pale eyes were flame all right, flame the color of ice—narrowed, focused, and intent: intent on _him._

The thought flashed across John’s mind of all the sessions he’d spent sparring with Sh’lok, who seemingly as a hobby picked up strange forgotten combat styles with peculiar names—singlestick and bartitsu and God knew what else. He thought of the one afternoon he’d wandered into the gym a little early and found Sh’lok _fencing_ , for fuck’s sake, fencing with Dimmock, with _sabers_. _Like an expert,_ John thought. _And who knows if he’d ever picked up a saber before that day?_ And now here Sh’lok was with a weapon that belonged to his own culture, and looking more than merely competent with it… indeed, deadly.

 _I think I’ve got a problem,_ John thought as the Vulcan before him lifted his own weapon into his hands, and he was briefly taken off guard by the unexpected mass of its counterweight. As he hefted it one part of his mind said to him, _This is going to be a bitch to handle till you get a sense of where the balance point is._ And another said, _Wasn’t the problem I meant. If he’s off his head with blood fever or whatever it is… I may be able to keep from hurting_ him _… but is he going to be able to do the same for me?_

On seeing them both armed, S’kroft stepped down from the central dais and headed for the other one. “If both survive the _lirpa,”_ he said, as matter-of-factly as if announcing the weather, “combat will continue with the _ahn woon.”_

John’s eyes widened. “What do you mean, ‘if both survive?’”

S’kroft regarded John with what looked like mild surprise as he walked past him toward his chair. “This combat is to the death.”


	5. ACT FOUR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At his best friend's wedding, Captain John H. Watson of the Starship _Enterprise_ gets pulled into the ceremonies in a way he didn't anticipate... and which even bringing a present probably wouldn't have averted.
>
>> S’kroft stepped down from the central dais and headed for the other one. “If both survive the _lirpa,”_ he said, as matter-of-factly as if announcing the weather, “combat will continue with the _ahn woon.”_
>> 
>> John’s eyes widened. “What do you mean, ‘if both survive?’”
>> 
>> S’kroft regarded John with what looked like mild surprise as he walked past him to his chair. “This combat is to the death.”

The sweat had broken out on John in a way that had nothing to do with the heat… though that was still bad enough. And the narrow-eyed, bloodthirsty glare that Sh’lok was leveling at him was doing sod all for John’s composure.

As much to get away from that as to seek some kind of clarification John hurriedly turned his back on Sh’lok and followed after S’kroft, who was about to seat himself again. “Now wait a minute, sir!” John said. “Who said anything about a fight to the death?”

Lestrade was behind John, looking up over his shoulder at S’kroft. “These men are friends! To force them to fight until one of them is killed—”

S’kroft stood looking at them both for a moment in perplexed silence for a moment, still and stern. “I can forgive such a display only once,” he said then, in a voice that was calm and quiet but brooked absolutely no dispute.

The executioner stepped swiftly out from one side to push between John and Lestrade, lightly swinging up that razory feather of steel to level the edge of it just millimeters away from Lestrade’s throat. Lestrade did a half-disturbed, half-impressed doubletake at the glinting edge of the thing, then glanced at John with an expression in which grimness well outweighed any humor.

John turned back to S’kroft, who was watching this with an expression too placidly chilly to be classified as grim. His dark level gaze, coming to rest on John, made it plain that in this case ignorance of custom would not be seen as a valid excuse. “Challenge was given and lawfully accepted,” S’kroft said, and turned away with an air of utter finality. 

He seated himself. “It has begun,” S’kroft said as the executioner stepped back out of the way, leaving John and Lestrade staring at each other. “Let no one interfere.”

The bell-shakers started in again and backed away from Sh’lok, who had been standing half-crouched and ready on the stone steps of the central dais, his eyes locked on John, fixed and fierce. John threw a glance at Lestrade, who also took himself off to one side out of the way, his glance going from John to Sh’lok to John again as John stepped out into that central area.

All he could think of at the moment was _Find some way to draw this out, find some way to take him down without hurting him too much, find some way to— But some way to_ what? The words _to the death, to the death_ were ringing over and over again in John’s head like that dark-voiced gong.

He wasn’t left much time to keep trying to think of some way to put off killing Sh’lok, as the Vulcan leapt down off the dais toward him, coming down in a crouch that John knew meant he was ready to jump again in a second. Sh’lok glanced at the way John was holding his _lirpa—_ its crescent blade leftward, mostly a defensive position—and flipped his in midair to grasp it again so that his blade was now on the opposite side, which for John was defensively weaker. The parts of John’s mind that most desperately wanted to retreat toward a position of _this can’t possibly be happening_ were usefully yanked back in the direction of reality as Sh’lok came at him not with the blade but with the shaft of the _lirpa_ held vertically, so that John was immediately forced to cross the shaft of his weapon with Sh’lok’s to hold him off. It was a favorite opening move in close-quarters forms of singlestick, part of a routine they’d run through once or twice when Sh’lok was trying to get John interested in yet another of the antique fighting styles he kept researching—

John felt a flash of pain at the memory but (mercifully) no more as the two of them strove for purchase, each trying to push the other off balance. Quickly enough John lost himself in the physicality of the moment, the way the sand was giving under his feet, his assessment of the dependability of the surface, the twist and strain of the two weapon-shafts against each other. It was something he’d learned to depend on over time, that sudden strange concentration that settled over you in mid-struggle, along with the accompanying heightened perception of everything: the way the sand glittered, the way the wind smelled.

The cross-bind of the _lirpas’_ staffs went on and on, longer than it should have. John kept expecting Sh’lok to knock him on his arse, but it didn’t happen. He shoved hard forward, lunging, forcing Sh’lok to leap backward a meter or so and recover into that crouching stance again. _Oh God that should never have happened,_ John thought, _I’d never have been able to pull off a brute-force move like that on him normally!_ —and the horrible image of what might yet be to come, of Sh’lok downed and John standing over him and being expected to _kill_ him, flashed before his eyes.

That split second of anguished inattention was all it took for Sh’lok to leap forward again, roundhouse-swinging the _lirpa_ at John and slashing his uniform tunic open right across—and also slicing John’s chest open from side to side, by sheer good luck just a millimeter-deep scratch. John stared down at his stinging chest and then up at Sh’lok in horror, realising what could have happened had he been standing so much as a pace closer. _All over,_ he thought. _He can’t help it, he’s going to kill me, I need to stop acting like he’ll snap out of this—!_

Sh’lok swung again, but this time John was ready for it, dancing back out of reach and then circling in and around, half-crouched as Sh’lok was, his reflexes and training taking over again. _Pretend we’re fighting ‘for real’, pretend it’s a not-just-for-first-blood bout, we’ve fought enough of those—_ But behind the moment’s pretence lay the dreadful reality, waiting to leap at John’s throat again.

Sh’lok lunged at John using the _lirpa_ lengthwise this time, a thrusting blade-first attack. John dodged it sideways, then swung up the weighted end of the _lirpa_ and clubbed Sh’lok upside the head with it. The Vulcan went down, sprawling, then scrambled to his feet again as John moved in, holding the _lirpa_ in what he was getting a sense was its best position for defensive mode; diagonal, blade up, weight down. Sh’lok immediately went for him with another roundhouse swing at his head. As John danced back out of range of it, Sh’lok kept coming and followed up with another swing at John’s lower abdomen, one that would have opened him up like a gutted fish had he not hastily jumped back and away, almost onto the central dais. Sh’lok kept swinging at John, forcing him back onto the little steps up, _watch out, don’t trip, that would be very bad—_  

John backed up onto the dais, not that he had much choice at this point, the way Sh’lok was pressing his attack. One swing brought down the small ceremonial shield that had been attached to the top of the small bronze column to the dais’s fore. Then Sh’lok reversed the _lirpa_ and aimed a blow with its weighted butt end at John’s head. He ducked, and the blow missed him but hit the coffin-shaped gong and broke it in two, its bottom half kicked sideways just enough to avoid falling into the small smoking firepit beneath it. Sh’lok was slightly distracted by the breakage—maybe the noisy boom of the gong as it broke was too much for sensitive Vulcan ears so close—and John flipped his _lirpa_ and punched Sh’lok in the gut with it. Sh’lok lost his grip on his own _lirpa,_ dropped it, and staggering backward, fell.

Gasping, John went after him. _Not good,_ he thought, as he realised he was starting to have trouble breathing in this thin hot air. _Got to keep him away from that now, he’s serious trouble with that thing—_ On hands and knees Sh’lok was scrambling for his fallen _lirpa_ and got hold of it again, but John leapt on him, forced him to drop it again as he pushed him down on his back near the front of the dais, and brought his own weapon up to shove it down toward Sh’lok’s throat. _Throttle him a bit, knock him out, buy some time. ‘If both survive’ means that this round_ can _end with both alive. And maybe that’ll be enough time for me to come up with an idea. There has to be a way out. A way out, a way_ out—!

Because if there was anything Captain John H. Watson excelled at (he thought as Sh’lok grabbed the shaft of the _lirpa_ pressing down toward his throat and started trying to wrest control of it from John), it was finding ways out of the traps the universe kept dropping in his path. Partly it was because he had such good reason to find his way out of them now. The early talent that had crystallized itself out around the tempting target of the _Kobayashi Maru_ scenario had grown into something both more polished and more desperate aboard _Enterprise,_ where the stakes were incalculably higher—where four hundred and thirty-five souls depended on him to keep them alive and as safe as could be in the dangerous career they shared. But here was the one soul of whole crowd of them that he was most desperate to protect, to keep alive, and he couldn’t think _how,_ there wasn’t _time—_

Sh’lok was steadily pushing John up and away, up and up until he was half-kneeling over the Vulcan. With a sudden burst of strength Sh’lok got enough control of the weapon to swing its blade-end around into that little bronze pillar and snap the blade of it, half of which fell ringing to the stone. The next moment there was a boot planted in Jim’s gut and pushing him away. The breath went out of him as he fell backward, but as he fought for his next breath and to get back to his feet he saw Sh’lok scrambling for the unbroken _lirpa_ John had forced him to drop.

By the time John had managed to get to his feet again Sh’lok too was up and coming at him, swinging it roundhouse-style again and forcing John back and back around the side of the dais. Again and again he dodged and jumped back out of range of those deadly slicing swings, his concentration split between watching for the moment when Sh’lok would lose enough focus for John to dart in and get that thing away from him, and the increasingly laborious business of getting enough air into his lungs to keep going.

But Sh’lok just kept coming, those pale eyes ablaze with fury, striking again and again at John with the _lirpa’s_ blade end, and John was feeling less and less like he had much darting in him. Just staying on his feet, just not falling down, felt like a much higher priority. Finally, though it seemed to take forever, came the moment John had been waiting for, a lunge that left Sh’lok just a bit overextended, so that John could slide in beside him, grab him by the right arm and the left hand grasping down toward the blade end of the _lirpa’s_ shaft, and throw him in a half-roll over John’s hip.

The throw worked as expected, and Sh’lok dropped the _lirpa_ as he went down. But in the moment when John finished the throw and straightened to stand gasping for his next breath, Sh’lok had scrambled to his feet again, snatching up the _lirpa_ as he did. Once more he feinted at John with the blade, and John hopped back from it but not far enough— and he couldn’t get his stance stable again before Sh’lok reversed the _lirpa_ and clubbed John in the chest with it. Down John went on his back, and for that frozen second he could do nothing but stare up in disbelief as Sh’lok swung the _lirpa_ up to strike, a breath away from driving the blade end of it down into John with all his strength.

 _“Sh’lok!”_ Lestrade shouted from the sidelines. _“No!”_ —and it was the sound of the anger and fear in the Doctor’s voice that got John his focus back. He waited just the half-second necessary so Sh’lok couldn’t avoid committing to the stroke, and then rolled to one side as that blade came down, burying itself in the sand next to his head. In that moment when Sh’lok was off balance John picked his feet up and rammed them up into Sh’lok’s chest, kicking him a clear two meters away and down onto his back.

It hardly took another second before the Vulcan was back on his feet again and up onto the dais, crouched once more with hands out before him ready to attack or defend, and looking like attack was his preference—

Behind them, S’kroft had got up out of his chair. _“Kroykah!”_ he shouted.

Everything went still and quiet—everything except Lestrade, who immediately left the sidelines and marched out to plant himself in front of S’kroft, his posture eloquent of pugnacious outrage. John managed to get up to his knees in the quiet moment, not quite daring to look away from Sh’lok but at the same time vaguely terrified by the prospect of whatever Lestrade might be about to do to relations between the Federation and Vulcan.

“Is this Vulcan chivalry?” Lestrade said, not making the slightest attempt to keep his fury out of his voice. “The air's too hot and thin for Watson. He's not used to it.”

S’kroft regarded him in the dispassionate manner of one examining a not entirely unexpected chemical reaction. “The air is the air,” he said. “What can be done?”

Lestrade reached into his belt pouch and produced a hypospray injector. “I can compensate for the atmosphere and the temperature with this. At least it'll give Watson a fighting chance.”

For a second S’kroft favored Lestrade with a strange, almost sidelong look. Though John was concentrating on using the momentary breathing space for just that, it was impossible not to think _God, doesn’t he look like Sh’lok right now—_

At which point the face sealed so completely over into its previous imperturbable mask that John wondered whether he’d imagined what he’d seen. “Thou may’st proceed,” S’kroft said.

Lestrade made his way over to John and dropped to one knee before him, pausing to throw a glance at where Sh’lok still half-stood, half-crouched, his eyes empty of anything but battle-rage and plainly ready, indeed hungry, to attack again. When he turned back, Lestrade’s face was grim. “You’re going to have to kill him, John—!”

Gasping, John did his best to give Lestrade the kind of incredulous look that would have accompanied the Doctor making some humorously idiotic claim in some after-hours officers’-mess argument. “Kill Sh’lok?” John said, wincing as the sting of the deep cut across his chest and the itch of the trickling blood made themselves more apparent in the quiet moment. “That’s not what I came to Vulcan for, is it?”

Lestrade didn’t bother answering that—just reached out and pressed the hyposprayer into John’s bicep.

“What’s that?” John said.

“It’s a tri-ox compound,” Lestrade said. “It’ll help you breathe.” He reached up and touched John’s arm, bracing him lightly for a moment. “Now be careful!”

“Sound medical advice,” John said, feeling the first hot rush of the drug as the next breath came easier. _And kind of optimistic as last words go,_ he thought as Lestrade got up and went back to where he’d been standing, and John got back to his feet. _But then that’s his style, isn’t it? Don’t unduly worry the patient…_

He threw a glance over at the spectators: T’Eyreen and her would-be partner standing, trying to look impassive—but there was that glint in T’Eyreen’s eyes, that unhealthy excitement. The thought flashed across his mind: _If Sh’lok gets stuck with her, he’s in for a rough ride—_ But the whole concept was a touch dulled, as if John’s brain felt it had no time to spare for it. Made sense: if matters went that far, it would mean John was dead. _Won’t be my problem then._ Yet at the same time a pang of pain went through him that had nothing to do with anything merely physical. A world with Sh’lok still in it was better than one without, and if that was the price John was going to wind up paying, there were worse things to die for—

_Stupid. Never mind this. Get up. He can’t be Sh’lok again until this is over, so get up and get on with it—_

“The _ahn woon_ ,” S’kroft said.

The bell-shakers started up again as two of the liveried attendants cast aside the purple covers over the objects they’d been holding and went out to present them to John and Sh’lok. John held out his hands and accepted from his man what looked like nothing but a canvas strap a couple of meters long with fringes and small weights knotted at either end. _Great,_ he thought, making a bemused half-shrug in Lestrade’s direction, _what the hell am I supposed to do with_ this?

He found out immediately as he turned to see what Sh’lok was doing in the moments while the attendants were clearing the field of the used and broken _lirpas._ The Vulcan had already doubled the strap between his hands and was swinging it experimentally. The next moment he was swinging one of the weighted ends whining around his head, and then whipping it around toward John. Before he had time to react the _ahn woon_ had wrapped bolo-like around his shins, and a vicious yank from Sh’lok took John down and dumped him on his back on that glittering sand.

A second later Sh’lok was practically on top of him, the _ahn woon_ doubled in his hands again as the Vulcan flailed down at him with the weights. John twisted out of their way as they thumped into the sand beside him. As Sh’lok bent down toward him getting ready to strike again, he grabbed Sh’lok by his forearms, and used him to pull himself up. Once on his feet again John braced himself and used his grip on Sh’lok to fling him across the sand and nearly into one of the cut-stone pillars surrounding the space.

Sh’lok was up on his feet again in a second, once more doubling the _ahn woon_ ’s long strap between his hands, and this time there was no mistaking what it was going to be used for as his eyes flicked toward John’s throat. At that glance John’s heart simply went sick inside him, for there was no Sh’lok left there at all. And with that glance—like so much polished metal, some machine’s unmoved look—any hope that there might be some last-ditch, unexpected way out of this situation started leaking out of John like the blood trickling down his chest. Even if there’d been time for last words, for goodbyes, there was no one there to say goodbye to.

 _Never mind then,_ he thought, dropping to his knees to scrabble for his own dropped _ahn woon_ in the sand. There was no point in just stopping. _He only acts if cowardice is seen,_ S’kroft had said, and stopping would probably read as cowardice. _So if one way or another you’re going to be dead shortly, then go down fighting!_

The thudding footsteps from behind brought John around just in time for Sh’lok to throw himself down on John’s chest with the doubled _ahn woon_ stretched out between his hands, ready to press down and choke him.

 _Oh no you don’t!_ John thought, seizing Sh’lok around his upper body and rolling them both over next to the central dais. Once on top he knew he should have used his own _ahn woon_ on Sh’lok as Sh’lok intended to use his on John: but he couldn’t do it, just _couldn’t._ It was too final, too deadly, _he’s my_ friend— John began punching Sh’lok in the head and chest and head again as hard as he could, again in some forlorn hope of stunning him or knocking him out, buying just a little more time, _just a little—_

 A forlorn hope and a short-lived one, as Sh’lok got his arms free enough to flip his _ahn woon_ around John’s neck, and then found enough purchase to roll the two of them over again. Once on top he lifted John with one hand by the strap around the back of his neck and with the other by the fist clenched in the neck of his uniform tunic, shoving him up onto the central dais and nearly over the edge of the little firepit there as he tightened the _ahn woon_ and his grip on John’s throat. Blinking and gasping, John caught an involuntary glimpse of the hanging half-gong, broken, blowing in the wind. _Coffin lids,_ he thought. It had never occurred to him when he came here that shortly he was going to need one of those himself…

John could smell hair starting to scorch, feel the burning heat against the back of his head, and tried desperately to push up and away from it. But his body wasn’t answering him the way it should. A peculiar shivering weakness was running down his limbs like water, and once again he was having trouble getting his breath. Not even Lestrade’s potion could do much about Vulcan’s heat and air, it seemed; or not for long. _Not for long enough, anyway. Well, he tried…_

With all the strength he could still muster, John brought his feet up between them and pushed Sh’lok away from him, back down onto the sand… and had no choice about being pulled down with him by the _ahn woon_ still wrapped around his neck. The pressure around his throat tightened, then—tightened more and more inexorably. There was no more air.

John clawed feebly at the choking pressure around his throat, feeling the pressure of it building in his sinuses, behind his eyes, blood trapped there and beating to get in, to get out. It was peculiar how dissociated he was feeling from all this, how distant. The face into which he was gazing was a mask, eyes narrowed to slits of enraged effort, the mouth a rictus of fury. _No one there…_

 _Bloody shame,_ John thought as the world went pounding-red in front of his eyes and his vision tunneled, mercifully shutting that last sight away from him. _Would’ve been good—to have a chance to talk to him one last time—_ Because there were a couple of things, of things he should have… could have…

Too late now. _But maybe… best not. Because the last thing you’d want to do… would be to hurt him…_

And it _would_ be the last thing. Because this was dying. And the one he’d always thought would be able to save him, if it ever came to something like this, wasn’t here. But he still couldn’t keep himself from calling out to him. _Because I don’t want to die. Not really. Not now. Not when—when there’s still so much to do, so much for_ us _to do, to…_ be… And because hope wouldn’t die, whether _he_ did or not: _one last time—_

_Sh’lok…!_

And then the final inescapable silence fell around him, and the bottomless dark folded around him, despite all his struggles, and abolished John Watson at last.

***

He had been so sure, as they stepped through the ancient redstone portals of the Place, that he would be able to keep enough of a grip on his rebellious transport to retain some modicum of dignity through the ordeal that was to come. Even after the way his body had betrayed him on _Enterprise_ , forcing them all into this untenable, intolerable situation, Sh’lok’s pride had once more forced him to believe that he would nonetheless now be able to get through the _kal-if-fee_ without completely losing control. And this needed to be true, for in their present position, much was at stake… not for him, but for another.

Nearly two weeks previous the first symptoms of _pon farr_ had begun to reveal themselves. It had been so gradual a thing—irritability that he normally could have controlled with a second’s thought flaring up repeatedly and interfering with his concentration: appetite failing even when it would have been logical to hunger and to eat: and the dreams. The dreams that did not feature T’Eyreen, but rather… someone to whom he was far more positively disposed. And a re-awakening, secondary to the dreams, of physiological responses that Sh’lok for many years had routinely walled away from his day-to-day life as too tiresome to deal with.

In retrospect he could not be sure what troubled him more—the tedium of dealing with the messy distasteful aftermath of the dreams, or the persistent and illogically sweet memory of cobalt eyes gazing down on him from very close, _so_ close… _So desired._ Not that Sh’lok quite dared to admit that to himself. The signs of growing intimacy that he seemed to be seeing in the waking world could yet be proven to be self-delusion. He had enough history of misunderstanding human response not to unequivocally trust his own evaluation of it. Better to remain silent, to make no untoward move that might irreparably damage something precious.

For a short time—perhaps the length of the day after his initial recognition of the symptoms—Sh’lok indulged the hope that what he was experiencing might due to his dual heritage manifest itself in some diluted, manageable form, or even simply go away. But it declined to accommodate him. And though Sh’lok turned all his attention to controlling or concealing the signs of what ailed him, they would not be concealed. His physiology, normally so well-schooled and biddable, swiftly turned on him and began betraying his condition to anyone with the wits to see.

Unfortunately, and as he’d greatly feared, this meant first the Doctor and then John. Nonetheless Sh’lok attempted to keep the worst and most personal information to himself, only revealing the details of his condition when his Captain forced the issue by direct command. In this matter at least he had no choice. Though there were numerous possible responses to situations that transcended even the discipline of the service, disobeying John Watson when he spoke from the authority of his position was not one of them. 

Having revealed what his Captain required, Sh’lok had spent the days that followed in exerting utmost control over himself to prevent John any further trouble… for enough more would be coming. There were irrationally angry and desperate moments in which he caught himself wishing that the condition would simply peak too soon, kill him, and spare John the necessity of further risk on his behalf. But having revealed what was the matter with him, it was too late for that. His death would hurt John, who (however illogically) would feel that what he’d done had been too little or come too late, and would blame himself. That was utterly unacceptable. Sh’lok must therefore live, and make the best of it.

Day by day this endeavour grew more difficult as the fever raged higher and higher in Sh’lok’s blood, rendering cogent thought impossible for first minutes and then long hours at a time. When he _could_ think, he found himself going over the same ground again and again… wondering at the fierce and unfailing kindness of the man who was willingly risking so much for his sake, and desperately trying to think of ways to limit the damage that man would shortly incur. For even if the _pon farr_ completed itself without adverse incident—excepting of course the incident at its very core for which Sh’lok had no desire whatsoever, but which could not be avoided—John would shortly begin the process of paying a high price for the life he would have saved.

His Captain, ever the daring gambler, had staked on this game nothing less than his reputation and his entire career. Should his gamble on the response of Starfleet’s upper echelons go against him, John would soon enough find himself living a life in which his best destiny—the occupation of the central position at the heart of a starship—would be lost to him forever. All Sh’lok could do in the moments to come (he thought on that last day, as they got into the turbolift that would take them to the Transporter Room) would be to get through the imminent ordeal in such a way that he could afterward turn his full attention to repaying the life-debt incurred.

The great irony at the heart of all this was that despite all Vulcan’s beauties, despite many years of life under its skies, no true desire of his heart lay on _this_ world any more. The satisfaction of all his hopes for his career and the Work done within it, the fulfillment of all his secret wishes and hungers, lay out past Vulcan’s atmosphere. Without exception everything Sh’lok wanted in his life now resided among the challenges and dangers of new worlds, aboard the ship that had become his true home and the friend who had made it so.

On that home, and that friend, Sh’lok now kept his attention firmly fixed. The events soon to be completed here in the Place of Marriage and Challenge were the severing of a tie. Once that tie was cut, once the long-ago agreement was consummated—however distasteful he would find that, absent any deeper bond between him and T’Eyreen—then he would be free, and could turn his attention back to his true life. His Captain would need him at his side in the troubles that would follow, and Sh’lok had silently vowed to be there for him to repay the debt, whatever it took, however long it took. Vulcan would fall away behind Sh’lok, probably for the last time, and T’Eyreen with it… and except for the prospect of never being able to visit his parents there again, he would be glad to let that be so.

Sh’lok’s only remaining concern was that when the bridal party arrived and brought S’kroft with it, his kinsman’s inevitable examination of Sh’lok’s mind and the status of the mindlock would reveal something of his true attitudes toward the marriage… which S’kroft would inevitably find disgraceful, and probably attempt to use against him. In preparation for this eventuality Sh’lok had taken the precaution, before he and the Captain and the Doctor beamed down, of placing as much of that material as he might in an even more inaccessible part of his mind palace than it normally occupied—walling the whole business up in what would appear to an outsider’s mind to be a simulacrum of Mount Seleya itself. S’kroft, of course, at first touch immediately perceived the mountain, from root to crown, and the ten thousand steps, and understood what they all signified—that any who sought the secrets hidden there would have to fight their way up and fight their way in, and every step of the way would be contested.

On perceiving the massive redoubt so forbiddingly, indeed insultingly, erected in his path, S’kroft merely allowed Sh’lok to feel him manifest a thin current of vague bored disdain. Then he simply went around the internal Seleya, straight to the neural pathways dedicated to the mindlock, where S’Kroft ran his mind coolly down them and certified them as intact and operational. It did seem to Sh’lok that S’kroft took some moments more about this than were strictly necessary. Doubtless the delay was intended as casually punitive, a reminder to his wayward scapegrace Clan-kin that Sh’lok’s life choices had often enough left the Vulcans surrounding him wondering whether mentally he was entirely intact.

At last S’kroft withdrew and went through the formalities of greeting with the Captain and the Doctor, and bade the ceremony go forward. Sh’lok made his way to the gong for the final stroke that would announce to any challenger that they had lost their chance, and that the marriage was complete all but for the final act that would release him from the intolerable hormonal bondage that had held him captive for days—

And then T’Eyreen came between him and the gong on the very threshold of that final stroke, and the descent into total madness began.

Sh’lok had naturally heard stories of the relentlessness of the in-mind events triggered by such a challenge—the ancient instincts so long and deeply buried in the Vulcan consciousness and subconscious, a welter of biological imperatives inextricably tangled up with behavioral cues, cultural conditioning and genetic tinkering tens of thousands of centuries old. In his pride— _again_ —he’d thought he would be able to stand his ground against them, for once paradoxically assisted by the human biology and genetics that had always otherwise caused him so much trouble.

But he was wrong. With the inability to strike the gong that final blow came a rush of sheerly hormonal terror and rage the likes of which Sh’lok had never felt before. His brain chemistry struggled to maintain its balance against the onslaught. But the deep-embedded physiological triggers swiftly drowned him in wave after wave of hunger and anger, overwhelming and irresistible. And it was sweet, _so sweet_ to let the emotion out _just this once,_ this single time in Vulcan public life when it was permissible, even expected, to do so. The heat built in Sh’lok’s blood as something that could physically be felt as fire, and it was good, _good_ to burn. _Of course it would feel good,_ was one of his last rational thoughts, _it’s a survival mechanism of sorts I suppose_ —

But not _quite_ his last rational one. As the burning built Sh’lok succumbed gladly to a ferocious longing to meet in battle whomever T’Eyreen chose to champion her in his despite, and slice them to bloody rags. But then—then he had no idea what was happening, _how_ it was happening, but she was pointing at his Captain—at _John?_

 _Now_ finally the human components of his heredity came a little to his aid. Now, impelled by a whole anguished set of imperatives quite different from the one presently raging through his veins, with a gigantic effort Sh’lok managed to wrench himself partway out of the hormonal bloodlust that had all but possessed him. Then he went staggering over to S’kroft to abase himself in ways that would have been unthinkable for one of solely Vulcan heritage. Fighting for every word against the _plak tow_ that sought to close his throat and seal his mind away from speech, he begged, actually _begged_ S’kroft to spare him and his Captain the horror that was about to unfold. And S’kroft… either _did_ not understand (highly unlikely) or _would_ not. Within moments the bells and the bloodlust and the words of ceremony had dragged Sh’lok under the surface again—still struggling, but impotent in the event against the forces that had killed many a full-blooded Vulcan before him.

And now it was like being trapped in a dream, a nightmare; trapped behind glass and hammering on it, shouting desperate pleas and advice at those on the other side, unheard, unhearable… unable to get through, to get anyone to pay attention to him, to _stop what was happening._ Within moments Sh’lok found he could see the other who faced him only through a veil of fury that stripped his opponent of all previous associations. He saw nothing there any more of a superior officer, a colleague, a comrade, a friend, but only a stranger, an enemy, someone smaller and weaker; a rival, an interloper, a conquest-to-be. Easy prey. It would just be a matter of wearing him down.

And like a puppet, like a mindless slave, Sh’lok did exactly what the ancient malign roar of instinct ordered. He wore him down, this interloper, relentless, merciless; slashed him, kicked him, smote him to the ground. Even so all the while he kept hearing anguished echoes in his mind, as if from a voice far away, crying _Why are you fighting him? He is the one you should be fighting_ for—! But the fever drowned that out. Only once he paused when some other voice he felt bizarrely obliged to obey pulled him for a second out from under the drumbeat pounding of his pulse. He drove his _lirpa_ down at the one lying on the sand in what should have been a killing blow, and missed. _Why did I miss?_ he thought, first furious, then confused. _Why am I—why is_ he _—_

But another more important voice of command shouted at Sh’lok to stop, and while a halt was called and new weapons were brought, once more the fever rose up in a dark green tide and poured itself over him, strong past any strength remaining in him to resist. When the _ahn woon_ was put into his hands the rage rose up in him again, fueled by that nagging fear that there was something wrong. And other voices from the distant past agreed with it. _There’s always been something wrong with you, ever since the start! Get this one thing right if you can’t manage anything else!_

In unnerved fury he leapt back into the fight. _Yes. Yes. Let this be done with quickly now, let this be over!_ Let him _win_ and put an end to the unease and uncertainty at last! And though his enemy rallied briefly after being tripped and brought down, it wasn’t enough, not anywhere _near_ enough to stop Sh’lok now. Victory and the end of this anguish was close to him, and the thought goaded him into a frenzy. He threw himself on his opponent with only one goal, to get the _ahn woon_ around his neck, and nothing the other did could forestall it for long. Finally he got it there, and though his enemy struggled still, there was no hope for him as he tightened and tightened his grip. Under his hands the other gasped and choked and clawed at his throat, more feebly every moment. And finally the struggles stopped and his opponent fell back limp against the sand, and from him no more breath came or went. 

That sudden stillness did something peculiar in his mind. It seemed as if there was some word, some cry, that he ought to have heard but had not, or had heard but only too late. Despite his victory, suddenly he felt strange, empty, lost. Then the voice of command cried _Kroykah!_ again—

—and with it everything changed.   

Sh’lok blinked. Blinked. Blinked again.

For he was staring down at something he did not believe. _Could_ not believe. A man’s body, that he was holding away from the ground by an _ahn woon_ wrapped around his neck.

Not just any man’s body. _This_ man’s body, gone deathly pale.

_No—!_

Limp against the ground. His flesh cooling as he touched it. _No—_ Cooling under his hands, _no no,_ it seemed only days ago when that hand had touched his, _that_ hand that now lay limp and still on the sand, and now _his_ hands— _his_ hands had—

“Get your hands off him, Sh’lok!” said a voice he knew, low but quite savage.

For moments he was frozen by the sound of a thin ragged wailing beginning far back in his mind. It was like his own when he’d gone out into the dunes all alone, night after night, to unburden himself of his grief after I’Chaya died. But that had receded into silence with the passing of years and the inevitable dulling of a child’s anguish. _This_ would never fade. Until his own life ended he would hear it—

He could have fallen to his knees and let that cry of anguish out, even here. But all Sh’lok could think of was how, should he ever have done such a thing, the man whom he had just killed would infallibly have knelt down by him and touched him and given him a moment to calm himself before asking what was the matter…

Lestrade pushed Sh’lok out of the way and knelt over John’s body, pulling the _ahn woon_ out of Sh’lok’s hands and gently lowering John’s head to the ground. Sh’lok stepped back, numb, as Lestrade unwrapped the choking strap from around the Captain’s throat and looked down at him, not needing to check his pulse. He could see as clearly as Sh’lok did, as Sh’lok always would, where it no longer beat.

“It’s finished,” Lestrade said, grim. “He’s dead.”

Slowly Sh’lok stepped away from there, head bowed, and made his way over to the attendants. “I grieve with thee,” he heard S’kroft say to Lestrade. Normally he would have been astonished to hear the expression come out of the man at all. But things were not normal, now. Nothing would ever be normal again.

Behind him he heard Lestrade pull out his communicator and contact the ship, requesting a beamup for the landing party. By the time Sh’lok had divested himself of the bridegroom’s cincture, Lestrade had come over and taken up so erect and challenging a stance before him that Sh’lok wondered whether the Doctor might assault him then and there. _And I would not resist… not in the slightest._ “As strange as it may seem, Mr. Sh’lok,” Lestrade said, his voice terribly level, “you're in command now. Any orders?”

Lestrade’s eyes were narrowed, tightly controlling some emotion that Sh’lok could not completely parse. But it was almost certainly rage, and Sh’lok was tempted to take best advantage of it and beg him, _Kill me now!_ It seemed just possible that under these circumstances, if sufficiently provoked, the man might do it.

 _But there would be no justice in that,_ Sh’lok thought. _And if nothing else comes of this, justice must come of it. For John’s sake._

For the moment all he could do was nod slightly. “Yes,” Sh’lok said, and if his voice sounded hoarse and rough in his ears, it was no surprise. His throat was already so tight with grief that he was astonished he could get out so much as a word. “I’ll follow you up in a few minutes. You will instruct Mr. Bradstreet to plot a course for the nearest Starbase, where I must surrender myself to the authorities.”

Lestrade said not a word more to him—just favored him for a moment or two more with that narrow cool look, almost a Vulcan expression, so strange to see on a face normally so mobile and expressive. And as Lestrade turned away from him to obey his order, Sh’lok was pierced to the heart by the thought of the other so-mobile face that he would never see expressing the inner workings of its inhabiting mind again, never again see frown or laugh or meet his gaze across the chessboard in frustration or delight—

It was astounding that one could feel such pain from a wound that was nonphysical. Astonishing that one could feel it and not collapse. But for the moment, as the Transporter effect hummed behind him, that pain was Sh’lok’s fate to bear while seeing out his last moments on this world.

He turned to T’Eyreen, struggling to keep his face sealed over the instant loathing he now felt while  forced to behold her. “T’Eyreen,” he said. “Explain.”

“Specify,” she said, appearing as cool and unperturbed as if it was the weather they were discussing and not the reason she had just used him as a weapon to murder the one man he cared about most in all the worlds.

“Why the challenge,” Sh’lok said. “And why you chose my Captain as your champion.”

“T’Kait wanted me,” T’Eyreen said. “I wanted her.”

“I see no logic in preferring T’Kait over me.”

The look with which she favored him now was trying hard to be detached and unmoved, but it was not succeeding. There was a gleam of contempt in her eyes that belied it. “Your name has been much whispered among our people, Sh’lok,” T’Eyreen said. “At first as the strange disrespectful one who spurned his House’s ancient traditions and went forth to seek his fortune among humans. Your story became a cautionary tale, and I realised I had no desire to be consort to one whose tale was told behind closed doors for amusement. Yet of late you are whispered about again, this time as one who despite all expectations has somehow managed to rise high in the Federation’s estimation, even to being called the best First Officer in Starfleet. As such, now you are becoming a legend among our people. And I came to know I also had no desire to be the consort of a legend, lost in the shadow you cast.”

That glint in T’Eyreen’s eye had started to acquire an annoyed look, as if somehow Sh’lok had been and done all this on purpose to spite her. “Yet by the laws of our people, I could only divorce you by the _kal-if-fee_. There was also T’Kait, who wanted very much to be my consort, and I wanted her. If your Captain were victor, he would not want me, and so I would have T’Kait. If you were victor you would free me because I had dared to challenge, and again I would have T’Kait. But if you did _not_ free me, it would be the same. For you would be gone, and I would have your name and your property, and perhaps even your child, by whose existence  everything else of yours on Vulcan would be given me to control… and T’Kait would still be there.”

Sh’lok held himself still for a long moment. There it all was, laid out so clean and simple. To this woman he and his life were merely pieces to be moved around the board for her own purposes… and not only his life, but also that of the inexpressibly precious one that she had used his to destroy. His loathing for her could hardly be expressed in words. As a bare beginning, _You repel me_ would have been strong candidates. But fortunately, for the moment there were only two words he needed to use.

“Logical,” he said; and for the first and probably the last time in his life, though he did his best to speak the word evenly, it came out as a curse. “Flawlessly logical.”

She accepted this as the compliment that it decidedly was not. “I am honoured.”

Sh’lok swallowed down the hundred other things he could have said, and turned to the young woman standing so protectively close to T’Eyreen. “T’Kait,” Sh’lok said. “She is yours. After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting.” The anguish writhing inside him at the thought of the one Sh’lok had so slowly realized _he_ wanted, now dead by his hand, rose up into his throat once more and threatened to choke him: but for these few moments he mastered it. “It is not logical… but it is often true.”

 _Because when one only wants… there is always hope. …_ But now there was no hope at all; nor ever would be again.

T’Kait’s expression, what there was of it, suggested she did not understand this in the slightest. But Sh’lok was beyond caring. He wanted nothing more than to get away from this place. He turned away and pulled out his communicator. “Sh’lok here,” he said. “Stand by to beam up.”

And then he went to make the only farewell that seemed at all necessary. Impassive, S’kroft sat waiting for him. His face did not move or change expression, but the lines in it seemed deeper than usual somehow. There was just a hint of sorrow there… but also something else that Sh’lok couldn’t read.

He had neither desire nor inclination to spend any time in the attempt. Sh’lok lifted his hand, parted, in salute. “Live long, S’kroft,” he said, “and prosper.”

“Live long and prosper, Sh’lok,” said S’kroft.

At the thought of what had just passed here, of what he had done, came that pain again: like a knife in his side, like a fist clenching around his heart—like a fire that would burn that heart out. Sh’lok shook his head. “I shall do neither,” he said. “I have killed my captain… and my friend.”

He turned his back and made his way out onto the sand by the central dais, sparing not one of the rest of the bridal party so much as a look: then turned and snapped the communicator open again. “Energise,” he said.

And the Place of Marriage and Challenge dissolved itself away in light.

***

If Sh’lok had cherished even the faintest hope that the sight of the Transporter Room, and the corridors of the _Enterprise_ thereafter, would have brought him any momentary breath of relief from the pain assailing him, he instantly found such hopes to be misplaced. Now, as he made his way to Sickbay and Lestrade’s office, he understood that whatever else happened to him now, he must leave Starfleet as soon as possible. Every corridor in this vessel spoke silently to Sh’lok of the man who would no longer walk here beside him, smiling, arguing, just _talking;_ sometimes (so well he knew his ship) even making his way along with his eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose and muttering under his breath over the stupidity of some planetary government or some ridiculous thing Fleet had done…

Never again. Never here, or anywhere else. _Dead,_ Sh’lok thought—if only to attempt to get rid of the ridiculous feeling that he was still _here_ somehow. _Delusion,_ Sh’lok thought, torn between scorn at his own weakness, and grief for what could never be again. _Some ridiculous neural aftereffect of_ plak tow. _Hormonal backwash._

_…Wishful thinking._

The wave of agony that overtook him as he got into the turbolift, thinking of the voice beside him that would never again say “Bridge”, was so profound that he collapsed against the lift’s wall a little and had to remind himself how to breathe, how to stand upright again, before someone should have a chance to see him. By the time the door had opened again he had managed at least to put his posture back in order and head down the corridor toward Sickbay. But everything else that made Sh’lok _himself_ felt raw and bleeding and empty, as if some most vital part of him had been ripped out by the roots.

Often enough he laughed at people who described him as “half Vulcan, half human”, even though he sometimes used the phrase as a convenient shorthand. Genetically, and psychologically, the reality was far more complex. But now he began to wonder through his pain if in an entirely different way he _was_ halved, or half of something else. Indeed _had_ been so for some time, and though he had seen, had simply never _observed_ , never— 

Sh’lok swallowed hard against the ache in his throat. He wanted to pour scorn on this idea too, as something suggested or enflamed by the _pon farr._ And his own words mocked him. _Having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting—_

He could have cursed himself, long and bitterly. Except cursing would merely have reminded him of John, swearing at some political cockup or convoluted diplomatic mess, and then breaking off and laughing at himself. And that laughter, that sound he would _never hear again—_

The door to Lestrade’s office hissed open in front of him. At least now he could look forward to a familiar voice that he _would_ be hearing again in the days to come, excoriating him as always but now with a new reason, utterly irrefutable, the best _possible_ reason to accuse and condemn him. _And I will welcome it. Because he is the last, the closest connection to, to—_

Lestrade and Dr. Hooper were doing something or other at one of the medical computer analysis stations as Sh’lok walked in. As they looked up and saw who was entering, they left the work and came toward him as Sh’lok took up stance in the doorway to Sickbay’s diagnostic area. _So that should I need to extract myself from one of their emotional displays in a hurry, I can do so,_ was the excuse his mind threw up for him, ready-made; a quick distraction from the painful truth that it was his own emotional displays that were likely to become an issue today.

“Doctor,” Sh’lok said, refusing for the moment to quite meet Lestrade’s eyes for fear of what he might see there, “I shall be resigning my commission immediately, of course.”

“But Sh'lok, I—”

It was too soon to allow the recriminations to begin: he needed to get at least this much said. “So I would appreciate your making the final arrangements.”

“Sh'lok, I—”

“Doctor, please, let me finish.” Hearing Lestrade’s tone, Sh’lok found himself a touch dismayed, for the man’s affect seemed not only not particularly neutral, but almost inappropriately bright. Perhaps the day’s events had led him to think this would somehow be helpful to Sh’lok. _Or perhaps I am misreading him completely._ After all, it was likely enough that the rapid and atypical termination of his _plak tow_ had left Sh’lok’s brain chemistry disturbed _. If not absolutely addled._ Surely Lestrade would understand, surely despite his inevitable and understandable anger at what had happened Sh’lok could still depend on his assistance— 

Sh’lok met his eyes now. “There can be no excuse for the crime of which I am guilty,” he said. “I intend to offer no defence—”

At this point Dr. Hooper, looking up at Sh’lok, or perhaps a little past him, threw him a look so torn between pity and a peculiar muted excitement that he had no idea what to make of it. “ I, uh… I think I left something, uh…” she said. “Would you excuse me?” And hurriedly she took herself out of Sickbay.

Through his pain Sh’lok felt a flash of sorrow for her. He was hardly ignorant of her feelings for him, and was certainly in no position to mock her for them. Dr. Hooper was probably upset on his behalf, but struggling for a way to convey it appropriately, and had removed herself until she felt certain of her ability to do so.

He dismissed the issue and turned his attention back to Lestrade. “Furthermore, I shall order Mrs. Hudson to take immediate command of this vessel.”

A voice spoke behind his left ear. “Don’t you think—”

Something went straight through Sh’lok’s heart that was _not_ a knife. _Hallucination wishful thinking madness but how what oh please—_ He whirled, and saw the impossible.

“—you’d better check with me first?” said John Hamish Watson, with half a smile.

 _“Captain!”_ Sh’lok gasped.

John walked past him out of the diagnostic room and bumped his shoulder against Sh’lok’s in a friendly way, _en passant._

_“John!!”_

Sh’lok seized hold of the man who was grinning at him—that flashing grin that he’d despaired of ever seeing again—and spun him around and would have simply pulled him close and buried his face against him _(oh John oh John oh John oh John!)_ if he hadn’t abruptly realised that Lestrade was still standing there watching all this, and smiling at him too. It was an unusual expression for him, completely and unreservedly appreciative. But the first smile, the one that mattered, attached to a breathing, _living_ John Watson and trained on him in its full force, for long moments left Sh’lok drowning in utterly unaccustomed joy, and unable to think of a single thing to say.

***

It wasn’t often that the Captain of the _Enterprise_ got to see his First Officer rendered speechless. The temptation to rib him about it a little was so, _so_ strong.

But on balance, it seemed to John that the two of them had been through more than enough today. Teasing was perhaps a bit premature, until they’d had some time to recover themselves. Also, Sh’lok had reached out to him, was _holding_ him… and John wasn’t minded to do anything that might make him think that was unwelcome.

So he held still, and just spent those moments looking with tremendous pleasure at a man he was overjoyed to have the chance to see again—because just a matter of minutes ago he wouldn’t have much fancied his chances. For as long as it would last, John just let himself bask in the dazzle of something he had never seen before—a full Vulcan smile, _this_ Vulcan’s full smile, grounded in blinding relief and… something much deeper, something much _more_. It was heady stuff. John felt the hair rising on the back of his neck, not in any kind of nervousness, but in a kind of reaction he’d been lucky enough to more-than-occasionally experience before in his line of work: sheer wonder. 

It took a breath or two for Sh’lok to compose himself. He let go of John and pulled his tunic down a tad, and cleared his throat a bit, and blinked a couple of times, and then made the most charming attempt at resuming normal operations that John had ever seen. “I am— _(blink, blink: choosing a word that would not be too revealing in mixed company)_ pleased!—to see you, Captain.” _Blink: expression of mild bemusement._ “You seem—uninjured—” _Blink. Expression of restrained relief._ “I am at something of a loss to understand it, however.”

John slid a sidelong glance in the Doctor’s direction. “Blame Lestrade,” he said. “That was no tri-ox compound he shot me with. He slipped in a neural paralyser.” It was hard not to be appreciative of such cleverness exercised on the fly, especially when it had saved his life. “Knocked me out… simulated death.”

 _Blink._ “Indeed,” Sh’lok said.

But Lestrade plainly judged them both already to be recovered enough for _his_ definition of normal operations to resume, which meant getting caught up on the aftermath. “So Sh’lok!” he said, eager. “What happened down there? The girl! The wedding!”

“Ah yes, the girl,” Sh’lok said. “Most interesting. It must have been the combat. When I thought I had killed the Captain, I found I had lost all interest in T’Eyreen. The madness was gone.”

The tone of voice in which he delivered this analysis was completely discursive, as mild and calm as if he was reporting on an interaction that had involved someone else, days or weeks ago. For the moment, John held his peace and nodded casually as if he was accepting just such a report. Later— _Days later? Weeks?_ —he knew he would hear more. Right now he was too glad to have _this_ Sh’lok back (as opposed to the one who’d been hell-bent on turning him into ten stone of lean mince) to care about pushing the issue.

And then came the sound he’d been dreading since he woke up on the diagnostic bed and realised where he was and what had happened. The in-room communicator whistled.

John went over to the screen on Lestrade’s desk and punched the comms button. “Watson here.”

“Captain Watson,” said Donovan’s voice, “Message from Starfleet Command, top priority.”

 _Oh God, here it comes,_ John thought as he leaned on the desk. Nonetheless he made sure he didn’t show the slightest sign of concern in front of these two. “Relay it, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir. Response to S’kroft's request for diversion of _Enterprise_ to planet Vulcan—”

He glanced toward Sh’lok in surprise. Sh’lok’s eyebrows went up: _both_ of them _._

“—hereby approved. Any reasonable delay granted. Komack, Admiral, Starfleet Command.”

It was as if a huge weight had fallen off him, but John concentrated on not moving his pose in any way that might suggest as much. Both the burden and its very welcome loss were his business. “Well, a little late, but I'm glad they're seeing it our way.” And he smiled slightly. “How about that S’kroft? They couldn't turn him down.” _And as for how he even found out about this… There’s a question for another time._ “Mr. Bradstreet, lay in a course for Altair Six. Our compliments to Vulcan Space Central, and leave orbit when ready. Watson out.”

He punched the button and straightened up. “Have to admit,” he said, “that this… flexibility… comes as kind of a surprise from S’kroft, after the way he was handling things down there. Kind of hard-edged.”

He glanced at Sh’lok, inviting him with the look to comment. But Sh’lok merely shook his head, his expression bemused and a touch brooding, though not in a bad way.

“And if he knows that I’m not as deceased as I seemed to be when I was removed from the field of battle…” John said.

“Almost certainly he knows,” Sh’lok said. “He will doubtless have deduced it. And should he desire confirmation, there is very little of any importance happening on Vulcan, or near it, that he does _not_ know… or cannot somehow find out.”

“And if he does, so what?” Lestrade said. “It was a fight to the death. And you were dead.” He shrugged. “No pulse, no respiration, damn near no brain activity. And if later on, that got better?” He raised his eyebrows. “Fine, that’s my division, granted. But Vulcan’s legal code’s _not._ When you hear from S’kroft next, Sh’lok, tell him your people really need to revamp their legal system to reflect the state of modern medicine. Strikes me as logical, wouldn’t you say?”

Bones stood there looking so insufferably superior that John had to stifle an urge to hug him. But it occurred to him that he had better things to do with that urge… and that someone else in the room, who had been in a rather combative mood as regarded intimacy that day, might possibly take such a gesture the wrong way. _Which right now… or at least until I figure things out… is the last thing I want. But later, though. Later…_

Lestrade was not up for waiting for ‘later’, though, on some matters anyway. “There's just one thing, Mr. Sh’lok,” Lestrade said. “You can't tell me that when you first saw John alive that you weren't on the verge of giving us an emotional scene that would have brought the house down—”

Once more Sh’lok assumed that mild-mannered, emotion-what-emotion, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression. “Merely my quite logical relief that Starfleet had not lost a highly proficient captain.”

John could have rolled his eyes, but restrained himself and elected instead to play along. “Yes, Mr. Sh’lok. I understand.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Of course, Mr. Sh’lok,” Lestrade said, straightfaced. “Your reaction was quite logical.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Sh’lok said.

As John led the way toward the door, and Sh’lok followed, Lestrade muttered, _“…in a ten-kilo sack of old cobblers!”_

John looked at Lestrade with his own version of the expression of mild surprise: then turned to his First Officer. “Come on, Sh’lok,” he said. “Let's go mind the store.”

***

The store, meanwhile, had (not at all to John’s surprise) been getting on with its normal casual routine of minding itself. That said, John would have to have been unusually deaf or distracted to miss the soft susurrus of interested gossip underrunning the normal murmur of business.

It took no more than the time than what they spent walking from Lestrade’s office to the lift, and the few glances of crewmen-passersby toward Sh’lok and away again, for John to see which way the wind was blowing. If Sh’lok was taking any note, he was showing no sign; he had already reassumed his everyday expression of a man occasionally amused but otherwise untroubled by the eccentricities of the humans around him. _Fine_ , John thought. _But we’re going to have to sort this rather sooner than later, or the crew’ll eat him alive. And me for afters._

They got into the lift: the doors closed. “Bridge,” John said.

And found himself on the receiving end of a look that was so full of desperate heartfelt _meaning_ that he couldn’t think of a thing to do except reach out for Sh’lok’s elbow and brace him, support him through it.

“A hell of a day,” John said, as Sh’lok went still under his touch, gazing at him.

After a moment, Sh’lok nodded. “It has been—” He paused, plainly looking for an adjective communicating the right degree of ironic understatement. “Eventful.”

“Yes it fucking well has,” John said, letting out a breath. “I’m sorry.”

Sh’lok looked stricken. “Captain,” he said. “You have nothing, _nothing_ to be sorry for—”

“John.”

“Yes,” Sh’lok said, as if in some tremendous relief. And then: “Thank you.”

John nodded. “Listen,” he said. “Sh’lok.” He brought up his other hand so that he held Sh’lok by the upper arms as Sh’lok had held him. “I may be as human as they come but I’m not all that expert on emotions. This I _do_ know, though. When you’ve had a day like we’ve just had, where you’re pushed into places you didn’t know you could go, you really need a little time to settle.”

“As excited particles fall back to their stable ground state,” Sh’lok said, “after excitation.” One eyebrow quirked.

John had to grin, and shook Sh’lok a little in amusement. “Thank you, Science Officer. So let’s find that resting state again, ‘cause we’ve still got work to do.” He took a breath, gazing into those silver eyes and very much wanting to make sure he was understood. “Later, and I mean hours from now, not days, we’ll go somewhere quiet, take our time, and find what needs saying. That suit you?”

“John,” Sh’lok said. “Yes. Very much.”

John gently squeezed those arms he held, reluctant to let go, as the lift began to slow. “Meantime we should both do what we can to take it easy,” John said. “Just follow my lead, yeah?”

“Always,” Sh’lok said.

John swallowed, for it sounded like a vow. All he could do was nod (saying nothing for the moment of all the times in their work when following was the _last_ thing Sh’lok did, when he ran ahead on the track of some answer or danger and it was John Watson who wound up doing the following). Then he let go of Sh’lok and turned himself around before the lift doors opened.

Into the Bridge they went, a Bridge full of the sweet tedium of nothing-important-happening-at-the-moment. It was like a plunge out of hot weather into cool water, and John savoured that contrast today more than usual. Everyone looked relaxed and focused… and John could just feel all the unanswered questions hanging in the air.

 _So let’s defuse things a bit._ “Report,” John said as he made his way down to the center seat.

“En route to Altair Six now, Captain,” said Mr. Bradstreet, “warp factor five.”

John sat himself down, stretching against the back of the seat in a casual way that he meant to be diagnostic for the sharp-eyed beings who inhabited this space. “Well, you know, Fleet did say ‘any reasonable delay,’” he said. “And the way we’ve been rushing around of late, I suspect Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t mind a quiet day or so with her engines. You know how she gets.”

A subdued chuckle could be heard from a couple of the Bridge stations. _Everybody_ knew how Mrs. Hudson got if her maintenance routine was interfered with… and she’d been getting that way the last couple of days.

“Drop us to warp two, Mr. Bradstreet. Let’s spare the crystals a bit and give her an extra thirty-six hours to put Engineering in a fit state to be seen by the planetary President. Because you _know_ we’re going to wind up with an influx of ground-grubbers traipsing through here…”

A commisserating mutter ran through the place. “Lieutenant Donovan,” John said, “have we heard anything from the Altair end of things as yet? Requests to reschedule VIP tours and so forth?”

“Now that you mention, sir…” Donovan said. “I wasn’t going to bother you, but—”

“No, let’s get them off our plates _now_ so they’re not all over us at once like ants at a picnic when we make planetfall. Go over the list by rank and position and pick the ones you think would be most positively influenced by getting a personal subspace call from a starship Captain.”

“Captain,” Sh’lok said, glancing up from his viewer after a few moments spent peering down it, “you would appear to be courting a potentially dangerous state of _ennui.”_

John leaned one elbow on the arm of the center seat and half-covered his face to hide his smile. _Message received, then._ “Duty’s a harsh mistress, Mr. Sh’lok,” he said. “No point in letting things slide so long that you make her start wondering where she left the riding crop. Donovan?”

“Yes, sir. The Chancellor of the Altairan Planetary Department for Interfederational Affairs has sent three messages already…”

“Great Bird of the Galaxy have mercy on my soul,” John muttered. “Let’s get on with it.”

***

 And for the next two hours and more John submerged his Bridge crew (and himself) deep in the most banal side of a starship’s business—protocol and en-route provisioning and pre-mission prep—while Sh’lok alternated working on some fascinating but inexplicable project involving antimatter mix equations and making occasional dry and cutting comments from the sidelines. _Not that this’ll put_ this _lot completely off the scent,_ John thought, _but at least it’s calmed them down and taken a bit of the edge off. They can see we’re operating as normal. And now…_

Now there only remained the second half of the necessary intervention. His First Officer’s comments about the people the Captain of the _Enterprise_ was calling were becoming more acerbic by the moment— and how Sh’lok _knew_ some of these things about some of these people had to go beyond mere deduction, no matter _how_ good he was at it. _Serial_ trigamy? _Is that actually a thing there? Too late, can’t unsee it now. Unthink it. Whatever…_

John was in the act of pinching the bridge of his nose and thinking _Now what’ll be the best way to do this—_  when the communicator went off.

“Sickbay to Bridge. Lestrade here.”

 _This is either the day’s biggest coincidence or I’m incredibly predictable,_ John thought. _And bugger me sideways if I care which._ He hit his comms button. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Is Mr. Sh’lok around?”

“Here, Doctor Lestrade.”

“If you’ve got a moment, Mr. Sh’lok, wouldn’t mind certifying you fit after the earlier excitement, such as it was.” Lestrade sounded bored. “Granted today was a bit anticlimactic, but the run-up to it got lively sometimes.”

John realised that the word “anticlimactic” was meant as a reminder of how cagey Lestrade had been about getting his apparently-dead Captain back onto the _Enterprise_ with an absolute minimum of people witnessing the event. It had been Mrs. Hudson handling the controls in the Transporter Room, and the most important part of John’s treatment—meaning injection with the antagonist for the neural agent Lestrade had used to mickey him—had been handled within about fifteen seconds of him materialising on the pad. Once it had worked, the walk back to Sickbay had been uneventful, as the few crewmen they passed paid John no more attention than usual. _Enterprise_ crew were after all well used to seeing their Captain heading back to his quarters with his shirt off (or half off, or in ribbons) after some energetic planetside adventure or sparring bout. 

“Doctor, I quite assure you—”

“Oh, go on, Sh’lok, get it over with,” John said. “There’s nothing for you to do up here right now except twiddle your differentials and mock a bunch of minor planetary functionaries.”

“Hardly nothing, Captain, when one compares such occupations to the dubious pleasure of being poked and prodded by the Doctor and dosed with his noxious potions—”

John simply cleared his throat and gave Sh’lok one of the milder versions of The Look.

Sh’lok met it with one of his own, the good-natured if wearily resigned Why Must I Repeatedly Endure Such Treatment From Inferior Beings expression, and got up. “Very well, Captain,” he said.  “I trust I shall not suffer too long at the Doctor’s hands and may soon return to my—” A sniff. “‘Twiddlings.’”

“We’ll be here,” John said, stifling a yawn. “Donovan, how far down that list are we?”

“About two thirds done, Captain…”

John was waiting for the turbolift door behind him to close. When it did he stood up and stretched, and then glanced around the Bridge. One by one he caught the Bridge crew’s eyes, and they went quiet, waiting for him.

“I know this is killing the whole lot of you,” John said, “so let me put you out of your misery. I can’t say much but this much I can tell you. Mr. Sh’lok’s wedding did not come off quite as expected.” _So damn true._ “The couple had a discussion—” _—of sorts—_ “and in light of their present life situations, in line with options available to them in Vulcan law, they’ve agreed not to continue the relationship.” _Also true… more or less._

“Irreconcilable differences?” Mr. Bradstreet said.

 _You have no idea._ “Not sure Vulcans would put it quite that way,” John said. “In any case, ladies and gentlebeings, being that our First Officer has saved this ship and its crew more times than I care to count, I think it’s a good idea that he should be allowed to continue operating uninterrupted at optimum efficiency. So your Captain intends to drop this matter and move on, and it would make him very happy if everybody else aboard could see their way clear to do the same.”

After a moment, “Sir,” and “Yes sir,” and “Aye aye,” went around the Bridge, a kind of quiet murmur. With that John knew the issue of having to deal with any further explanations or ongoing prying and gossip was handled. From these people, the word would percolate through the ship: _Let it go._ And it would _be_ let go, because his crew knew their Captain trusted them to do right. 

“Thank you,” John said. “I appreciate it.” And then he sat himself back down in the center seat, rubbing his back and wishing something could be done about the damn thing’s cushions and the issue of back support… except that he’d never take the thought any further, because no one was _supposed_ to be comfortable in this chair. “Lieutenant Donovan,” he said, “I think I can handle maybe two or three more of those calls before my stomach turns.”

“All right, Captain, if you insist…”

So John got on with it. But his mind was elsewhere.

***

 Sickbay was empty of other crewmen when Sh’lok arrived, and no staff were in attendance but Lestrade. Sh’lok understood that this could not have been coincidental, and he was grateful for it… though he worked hard not to let the gratitude show too obviously. There were after all conventions of behaviour to be observed, regardless of any other ways the universe might be rearranging itself.

Lestrade was at his desk, scratching away at a padd and looking like he despaired of seeing the end of that work any time soon. When he saw Sh’lok come in, his expression suggested that of someone being rescued from torture.

“That was quick,” Lestrade said. “Thought you’d have stalled for half an hour or so.”

“And delay this hour of supernal delight?” Sh’lok said. “My cognitive abilities have quite resumed their normal function, Doctor. The sooner this distasteful duty is dealt with, the better.”

Lestrade snorted. “If you think my report-handling workload allows me to spend a whole hour indulging your whinging, Mr. Sh’lok, you’ve got another think coming. Now that I’ve got a crisis baseline to compare against, a five minute full-body scan and another five to do your bloods and we’re finished. Get up on the damn bed.”

So Sh’lok, a little bemused by the good-humored way in which this ultimatum was delivered, got up on the damn bed and let Lestrade get on with his work.

“Huh,” he said after Sh’lok had spent a few minutes on the diagnostic bed. Lestrade was frowning down at one of his remote-access padds for the initial readout.

“Eloquent as always, Doctor,” Sh’lok said.

“Cracked vertebra,” Lestrade said, sounding a bit abstracted. “Hairline longitudinal in the vT4. Probably from when John threw you into that wall. Not too deep and not too wide, thank God. When we’re done here I’ll regrow the bone. You hadn’t noticed any pain from that?”

The merely physical aches and pains that Sh’lok had brought back with him from Vulcan had felt so unimportant and insignificant in the face of the nonphysical ones that he’d quite discounted them. Now, though, they were beginning to clamour for attention. “Not then.”

“Now, though? Well, easily put right. Just relax for a few.”

That was more difficult now as the memory of the fight resurfaced from the holding space into which Sh’lok had shoved it preparatory for its dissection, analysis, and final interment. He flushed hot with shame. “Doctor,” he said, “the place where I—wounded the Captain—”

“Healed, no scar,” Lestrade said, still sounding absent, not bothering to look up from the padd. “No worse than that hiccup you and Bradstreet had that time with the sabers. John got lucky. Or you being off your head with Vulcan sex hormones ruins your coordination. On balance, a bit of both.” Now Lestrade glanced up at him. “What _is_ it with you and edged stuff, anyway? Always damaging something. I bet you used to run with scissors.”

This conjecture was so peculiar that Sh’lok judged it best to just keep quiet. “Never mind,” Lestrade said. “Probably some deep developmental thing. Definitely _not_ my division at this point, thank God.” He went into the adjoining lab room and came back a few moments later with a small thin ossostim pad. “Boost up,” Lestrade said, and when Sh’lok obeyed, slipped the pad under his back. “Down again. Thank you. Stay still now, don’t speak, breathe shallowly. Five minutes.”

Sh’lok did as he was told. Five minutes later Lestrade came back and consulted the padd again to see what the bone regrowth device was telling it. “Fine,” he said at last. “Takes half again as long as usual for your bones because of the density… never get used to that.” He slipped the ossostim out from under Sh’lok. “Any other painful spots I should know about?”

“My midsection feels somewhat abused.” Sh’lok disliked making such admissions, but putting a situation like this right was after all what Lestrade was for.

“No surprise there,” Lestrade said, “as I saw John’s boots in your gut at least twice, and at that point he’d kind of given up on being gentle.” He studied the readout on his padd. “Okay, some deep muscle bruising but no organ involvement. I’ll give you some sub-Q analgesia for that, but it won’t stop you turning all kinds of green and blue in a day or so.” Lestrade put the padd down. “Back in a sec and we’ll do your bloods.”

Within a few moments he returned with a hypospray and a hypodrawer, taking the blood first and setting the drawer and padd aside to do the analysis, then administering the pain relief. “All right,” Lestrade said, leaning on the diagnostic bed next to the one where Sh’lok was swinging down his legs and sitting himself up. “For the next day or two—”

“The Captain— John suggested that we should ‘try to take it easy.’”

“After the day you two’ve had? Bloody hell yes,” Lestrade said. “You do that. And tell 'Doctor' Watson I concur in his diagnosis.” He reached over to the padd, picked it up, studied it. “Yeah,” Lestrade said, “the hormone levels are still fairly high, though nowhere near where they were a couple of days ago. Probably take a couple of days for them to drop back to pre- _pon farr_ levels… but judging by the way you are right now, your normal functioning won’t be affected. You might expect some vasodilator events as things settle down. Shouldn’t persist, though.”

Sh’lok nodded and got off the diagnostic bed.

Lestrade picked up his various pieces of equipment and piled them on his desk. “All right, Sh’lok, you’re fit to return to duty,” he said. “Assuming there isn’t anything else you need to tell me?”

Sh’lok hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “One thing.”

Leaning against his desk, Lestrade merely tilted his head at Sh’lok a little as if to say “Proceed.”

Sh’lok took a breath. “By saving John’s life, Lestrade,” Sh’lok said, “you also saved mine.”

Lestrade gave him a slightly uneasy look. “Come on, Sh’lok…”

“Doctor. You were not there to hear what I said to my Clan-brother before I returned. He bade me live long and prosper. I told him I would be doing neither. Leaving the issue of prospering aside… I would not have lived long past John’s death.” Sh’lok swallowed, looked away. “It was no threat; merely a statement of fact. For those who either by intent or accident have done violence to one who—one who they… Well.” He shook his head. “In Vulcan experience, life seems to make a habit of finding them some way, fairly quickly, to depart.”

“Um.”

A thought presented itself that Sh’lok had had earlier and hadn’t been sure what to do with. “By saving my life in this way, you have conferred a value upon it.” He met Lestrade’s gaze, though he didn’t really wish to. “I must admit that it is a currency I do not know how to spend.”

Lestrade was silent for a few moments. “If you’re soliciting suggestions,” he said at last, “I’ll tell you how. Spend it on _him.”_

Sh’lok stood quiet and processed that.

“Might pain me to admit it, Sh’lok, but you’re a genius about most things,” Lestrade said. “This won’t be any different. Now get the hell out of here and let me deal with your damn paperwork.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Sh’lok said, and went.

_***  
_

In the event John kept himself in the center seat for another hour and a half. _A long day,_ John thought. _I got up: I missed breakfast for paperwork: I dueled my First Officer to the death: and then I sat in the bridge for half a shift doing political scutwork. Just another day on the_ Enterprise…

And it wasn’t over yet. If he was any judge—and (with a shiver of anticipation) he very much hoped he was — the evening could prove far more momentous.

_If my courage holds. And if he doesn’t think I’ve lost my mind…_

John stood up. _Then we’ll see._ “It occurs to me,” he said to the Bridge at large, “that I’m a couple of meals short on the day. Unless someone needs me, I’ll be off doing something about that.”

“Yes sir,” and “Good evening sir,” and “Have a good dinner,” people said.

John smiled half a smile, knowing the sound of his Bridge crew saying _What are you still doing here an hour into second shift? Go the hell away._

“Thank you all,” John said. “Helm’s yours, Mr. Bradstreet. My compliments to Ms. Merivale when she arrives, and tell her to take good care of my ship.”

“Yes sir.”

John took himself down to the Officers’ Mess, hoping to see Sh’lok there; but there was no sign of him. “He was here earlier for a while,” said Mr. Baynes, one of the mess stewards, who tidied off John’s usual table for him, the one by the chess set. “Actually ate something, for a wonder. But after—I don’t know, maybe an hour or so?—he went off again. He’d taken a call from Mrs. Hudson just before that, something to do with some equations he had for her.”

“Very well,” John said, “thank you.” And he ordered himself a salad, because Lestrade had been twitting him again about getting more fiber in his diet, and settled back to eat and see what would develop.

***

Sh’lok had meant nothing but good in working on these antimatter mix equations and bringing them to Mrs. Hudson’s attention. After all, having her engines operating at improved efficiency was a matter of both pride for her (as he knew) and of great importance for the safety of the ship on mission.

What he had _not_ quite expected was being given what John would have described as “the rough edge of the Chief Engineer’s tongue” for bringing them to her. Apparently Sh’lok had missed some (apparently) (to her) vital bureaucratic step in which such mooted infrastructure changes were supposed to go through the Captain first for approval to be given further consideration by her before progressing to the  “proof of concept” level. Mrs. Hudson spent many minutes explaining this to him in several different ways, including extensive citation of what she felt were the pertinent regulations.

Sh’lok held still for a good while except for nodding politely to Mrs. Hudson and responding verbally as if he was paying attention to her. He was, of course—at one of the less vital levels of his consciousness—but elsewhere he was busy.  

For one thing, his mind palace needed serious attention, having been through much annoying construction work that now needed to be undone. His version of Mount Seleya was, unquestionably, an extremely well-detailed one, but it was taking up too much valuable space. He spent some moments agreeing with Mrs. Hudson regarding the necessity for good order and correct protocols to be observed in proposals that would affect _her engines,_ while he banished the holy mountain, willed John’s gingerbread-laden Denebian spy-fortalice back into place, and then trotted up the seventeen steps to put other matters to rights.  

Chief among these was the business of shoving the more annoying and personally painful aspects of the day’s events down where they would not unduly impair events that might be yet to come. He made his way through the back doors to the treasury, where gigantic golden-brown eyes blinked at him from under the heaps of treasure. These eyes then vanished to be replaced by a grunting woofing red-coated _sehlat_ that came skidding and tumbling down one small hillside of gold and lolloped toward him.

“Good boy, _good_ boy, I’Chaya!” Sh’lok said, and produced from the air a disreputable-looking leather bag—the one from that other story his mother had read him so long ago: the bag that the King of the Winds had given Odysseus and warned him not to open. This version of it was stuffed full of T’Eyreen’s cold spite and everything else awful about the day, and tied tight shut. The bag’s virtue was such that for the time being, Sh’lok would be able to think about its contents but not be pained by them. Analysis and a full deconstruction of the experience could come later: but not tonight.

“See this?” Sh’lok said, waving the bag around in front of I’Chaya, so that the _sehlat_ crouched and wiggled and jumped and grunted in happy excitement. “Know what I want you to do with this? _Go bury it!”_ And with all his might he threw it out into the faintly jewel-sparkling darkness.

I’Chaya leapt up and yapped with delight and tore off after the bag. From out in the dimness, moments later, came vague soft sounds of growling and shaking and other assorted punishment, and then clinking and clattering that suggested a hole was being dug: a deep one. Sh’lok let out an amused breath, knowing that even when he wanted the thing again, it would take some doing to find it.

He stood there dusting his hands off and considering what to do next. _I suppose I could tidy a bit—_

He stopped himself. _You are stalling_. _There’s nothing else left to do. You need to go to him now. Emulate his courage and do something useful with it. Say, as he suggested, what needs saying. And if everything just this once goes right, you’ll hear him say—_

“Mr. Sh’lok!”

The world snapped back into focus. Engineering did, anyway, and so did Mrs. Hudson. She was standing there with her arms crossed and tapping one foot.

“Mrs. Hudson,” Sh’lok said. "…I beg your pardon.”

“Mr. Sh’lok,” she said, and there was the strangest little smile on her face. “Have you been listening to a single word I’ve said?”

He was quite prepared to recite her last five minutes or so of dialogue as proof that he had. But even as he opened his mouth to do so, Mrs. Hudson started laughing softly.

“Sh’lok,” she said, glancing at the datacart he’d brought her. “The physics in this looks quite passable. Come back tomorrow or the next day and we’ll stress-test it a bit. Meanwhile—” She actually gave him a little push. “Stop wasting my time and get on with you. Go be where you want to be.”

He saw in her eyes with sudden total clarity that she knew exactly where that was. “Mrs. Hudson,” Sh’lok said. “You are a most perspicacious woman. For a human,” he added, in case she should get the idea he was going soft.

 _“Out,”_ said Mrs. Hudson.

Out Sh’lok went.

***

 John spent a good while in the Mess before coming to the conclusion that it was just barely possible that Sh’lok had actually taken him at his word and _was_ off somewhere taking it easy. Possibly down in his quarters meditating or something.

 _Well, good,_ he thought as he sat there toying with a third coffee. Yet he was also twitching a little, and not from the coffee, thinking of that last private moment in the turbolift. _Because… am I sure he’s okay? He couldn’t have misunderstood me, could he?_

The urge to go find Sh’lok, right away, and start saying to him what needed to be said without any possibility of being misunderstood, rose up in John and for several moments shut the breath away from his lungs nearly as thoroughly as the _ahn woon_ had. _Ugh, bad memory, the hell with_ that! 

When normal respiration patterns resumed again, John sighed. At least there hadn’t been any messages from Lestrade. That meant whatever had come of Sh’lok’s exam, it wasn’t anything that had merited the Captain’s immediate attention.

_Still, I could just casually drop by Bones’s office…_

_No._ Because Bones would see straight through it, and it would look completely pitiful. _Which is exactly why you haven’t already used the damn communicator like a_ sane _Captain does when he actually wants to know where somebody_ is. _Because you don’t want to_ look _like you’re looking for him. This also being why you’re not up off your butt right now and heading down for his quarters. Because that could send a message that you’re not sure you want to be sending to the whole damn ship until you’ve talked_ first.

John stared at his coffee. _God, listen to me, I sound like a teenager._

And he shivered a little as his stomach did a flipflop.

 _I even_ feel _like a teenager._

Which made him pause for a moment.

 _When did I last feel like this? About_ anybody?

John had to stop and think about that. Then he smiled to himself, though there was a rueful edge to it. _It’s been way too long._

 _And_ exactly _like this? Never._

John breathed out, and stood up. He picked up the coffee cup—his dinner dish already having been removed—and took it over to the service hatch, which promptly closed and vanished it. Then he went walking, knowing perfectly well where he was going to end up.

His problem-solving walks were one thing. John made sure he never went to any single specific part of the ship when something was troubling him, because he didn’t want any part of _Enterprise_ becoming contaminated by such associations to the point where he wanted not to think about it. That would be dangerous. When he was simply feeling reflective, though… there was one place he didn’t mind being.

John took a turbolift down to the secondary hull and strolled aft, not hurrying. On his way through he  purposely skirted the Engineering area. Bearing in mind what Sh’lok had been working on earlier, he might well be having a tete-a-tete with Mrs. Hudson, and John never liked to take the chance of disturbing them. _Because put the genius theoretician and the master engineer together and who knows when they’ll start brainstorming and come up with instantaneous quantum transport or some such. No, if that’s what they’re up to, leave them to it…_

Eventually he reached his destination: the door at one long corridor’s end. It was one of very few interior accesses on _Enterprise_ that had a double door, both layers of it strengthened for pressure and both interleaved with inbuilt forcefield management in case one or both of them should fail. Normally this door could only be opened when there was a coded override in operation from the Bridge. But as a matter of course John knew that code, and touched it into the door control now.

The outer door slid open, then the inner one. John stepped through, paused just inside the doorway to tap the closing code into the interior panel, and waited until the doors both slid shut and both sets of seals, the physical airtight ones and the nonphysical forcefield seals, went tight or phased in. After a few moments the light above the door went green, casting a faint radiance around. Everything else around him lay dark.

John turned and stood still as his eyes got used to the dimness in the shuttle bay. To either side of him, pale half-seen boxy shadows, the two shuttlecraft _Galileo_ and _Copernicus_ sat waiting for their next mission. John walked down the wide aisleway between them, glancing at the tiny power-light telltales showing by each one’s hatch, noting the shine on their hulls. Somebody had been polishing them up in preparation for the visitors from Altair VI.

He nodded, as that was as it should be, and went on past them into the big echoing space, the only sound coming back to him that of his footsteps. This far away from the engine room, the subdued throb of power that ran everywhere through _Enterprise’s_ fabric was at its faintest. The sensation always left John feeling a little unsettled, even exposed, yet there were times—like now—when he nonetheless courted it. _That touch of danger…_

John made his way quietly down to the quarter-dome doors at the end of the hangar bay, heading for the control panel on the left-hand side. It took one six-digit code to get it to slide open, a second to bring the panel live, and a third to set the desired aperture. Then he hit the control labeled ACCESS.

Slowly, almost silently except for the softest murmur of actuators, a crack appeared down the center of the quarter-dome, widening as the doors began to slide open. 

In normal operation, though it might seem to a casual observer to be open to space, the hangar deck was never completely exposed to vacuum. Even with the doors open, a pair of forcefields—one inside, one out—remained in place, both keyed by default to allow only matter matching the composition of shuttlecraft hulls or other approved craft to pass through. Now John turned away from the panel and walked to the slowly-growing opening. There he took up a stance at the middle of it as the doors drew away from him on either side, and before him the unimpeded view into the vastness of interstellar night opened out.

The space between Vulcan and Altair VI was fairly star-sparse, and at warp two the occasional stars that could be seen appearing to move from this viewpoint drifted by over and around and beneath _Enterprise_ and fell away aft in a leisurely glide. Away in the endless distance, in what appeared right now as a broad diagonal, upper left to lower right, the sideways-seen disc of the Galaxy glowed in a faint firefly shimmer against the unending dark.

John stood there a while and let the silence and the infinite vista open him out; let himself settle, go quiet and still. …It wasn’t truly, perhaps, a resting state. That frisson of danger, of the risk of standing so exposed to the universe even protected as he was, still trembled along John’s nerves. But he stood there and allowed himself to feel it, for he was about to embark on a new course. _Could be dangerous,_ he thought. _Maybe the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done._

_Maybe the best._

John breathed out and slowly made his way over to lean against the meter-and-a-half-thick edge of the left-hand door, feeling the coolness of the metal seeping through the back of his uniform tunic, and against his cheek when he turned his head left to rest his face against it and gaze into the night. There was one other force to be taken into account as he made this choice: the one he’d known for just a little longer than he’d known Sh’lok. But she had primacy, and had to be reckoned with.

John leaned his face against the steady coolness of her durasteel plating and considered his various previous relationships, casual or otherwise. There was no point in denying that he had a lifelong weakness for a beautiful face coupled with a sharp brain… which would accurately describe most of the women with whom he’d become involved over his time in Starfleet. It was true that in what felt to John like his previous life, before the injury, before Maiwand, his preferences had swung more widely afield. Since then, though, when he’d started to work his way up through the command chain from ship to ship, and at last to the center seat where he sat these days, almost all of John’s liaisons had been with women. Some of his crew, he knew, thought this preference was rooted in some odd old-fashioned conservatism. But John wasn’t at all sure about that.

 _Because mightn’t it be a call-out to this other relationship?_ he thought, straightening a bit and leaning his head back, while idly stroking one hand back and forth against the cool smooth metal. _The most permanent one, the one that matters above and beyond all the others?_

John sighed. It was, he supposed, his version of Sh’lok’s “the Work”: the underlying passion to which one’s loyalties were silently sworn. And passion was the right word.

It was a strange thing, being the master of a starship… if indeed master was the right word. _Because you always know whose needs come first… who really rules the roost._ And traditionally, right back to the wet-navy days and long before, ships were always _she._ Maybe a side-reference to the oceans they sailed on. Maybe now a reference to the far vaster ocean of space: ever-changing, profound and powerful in her moods, infinitely fecund. _Well,_ John thought. _A bit species-ist there, perhaps._ Yet _Enterprise_ was “she” and “her” to him, and in none of the long quiet times he spent listening to her had she ever let him know that she wanted a different pronoun.

Because there definitely was communication of a sort. It was a most private matter, so much so that not even to Lestrade had John ever breathed a word about it, for fear of having it rubbished as hallucination or delusion, however mild and benign. But every now and then he came down here and stood in the quiet and thought things over… and he could always feel that presence, unobtrusive, silent but always known to be listening.

Naturally John knew he wouldn’t have been the first one to feel sure that a ship had some kind of animating quality, a sort of dreaming sentience. In this case, possibly what he was feeling was some obscure artifact of the lives that were lived within her? _No telling._ All John was sure of was that the sense of mostly-quiescent awareness around him was on his side.

But it was a feeling he didn’t care to take for granted. He never felt that presence quite as strongly as when he felt he had something to communicate to _it,_ rather than the other way around. And he definitely had something to communicate now. When moments like this came to him, John felt something similar to that old English-countryside superstition about how when important things were happening, if you kept bees, you had to go tell them or their feelings would be hurt. _So I tell my ship things,_ John thought. _Captains are allowed to be a_ little _eccentric, yeah? As long as I don’t start chasing space whales or playing with little clicky balls I’ll be okay._

But he also knew that there were captains whose relationships with their vessels were terrible and accident-ridden, just as there were ships that (rumor whispered it) hated their commanders, killed their crews. The very thought of that kind of thing horrified John. He knew his relationship with _Enterprise_ to be very special. They had proven to be lucky for each other, _good_ for each other. That relationship was something he didn’t dare imperil, because it kept his crew (and incidentally him) alive and well. So he was careful to keep the lines of communication open.

He rolled his head a little to the left again, gazing out into the dark. _I want this,_ John thought at last. _I want this so much, and though I’ve been sort of wandering around the edges of it for months, I didn’t really_ get _it until I was_ dying _earlier, so yeah, that was me being an idiot, hello!_

John sighed. _I don’t know what this is going to be like, and it scares me, and he’s my best friend and my fellow officer and I_ really _don’t ever want to hurt him, and there are a hundred ways to fuck this up. But I feel like this is important, like if I don’t take this step toward him, if I don’t take this chance, I’m closing a door that it would be really stupid to close. For both of us._

John took a breath. _He’s in your service, too. You’re part of the Work, to him. If I make this commitment, of course things will shift. They’ve got to, a bit. But never away from you, and the people in you. I promise._

There was no immediate answer… not that answers to his questions in this mode tended to come quickly. For a moment or two John felt very silly. But he couldn’t _not_ ask… because there was just something _about_ this ship. He had felt it when he’d first come up in the shuttle, after being recalled to Earth, and on approach to the orbital shipbuilding facility had seen the Sun rise over _Enterprise’s_ primary hull, blinding, flooding her with light—a swift brief dawn over a small new world. In that bright moment it was as if someone or something had reached down to John’s soul where it lay strung tight and waiting, and plucked from it a single singing note that thrummed all through him: a sudden sourceless knowledge and certainty of being, unexpectedly, marvelously, in the right place, at the right time.

This ship was the right place. This time was the right time. And now something new had happened: another set of conditions manifesting themselves which were also, John thought, part of the right-place-right-time nexus. But now it was his hand on the strings.

 _Just please let this be okay with you,_ John said silently. _We two, we’re special together. Let us three be special together too._

At which point the darkness spoke to him, its voice very deep, very soft.

“Ah, John,” it said. “There you are.”

His heart leapt in him: not just at the sound of that voice—itself dark in this darkness, part of it, and oh God _sexy,_ how had he never heard before how impossibly _sexy_ that voice was?—but also at the timing.

 _That was an answer, wasn’t it,_ he thought. John stroked _Enterprise’s_ cool skin one last time _…Thank you._

Then he turned to face the man walking slowly toward him. “Sorry,” John  said. “I didn’t hear you come in, I was—” _Talking to my ship._ “Distracted.”

“Indeed.”

“Hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding me.”

Sh’lok shrugged a one-shoulder shrug as he paused near John, gazing out past him into the longest night. “You were not in any of the other logical places,” he said after a moment. “And you often come here when you want to think.”

“True,” John said. _Oh God, that voice._ Heat and cold were running all over him at the sound of it. _Am I coming down with something? Yes, yes I am, I know_ exactly _what I’m coming down with. Oh please God let it be contagious._

Sh’lok leaned against the door’s broad edge next to him, looking out past John at the slow stream of stars falling away behind them. “A remarkable vista,” he said.

“It is. And beautiful.”

“…Yes.” John saw Sh’lok swallow. “If my presence is unnecessary,” Sh’lok said, “I’ll go. I was merely thinking that possibly…”

He trailed off as John looked up at him and saw how the starlight caught in those silver eyes, where there was less silver than usual, and more darkness. _The light level in here,_ John thought. _Or something else. Oh sweet God your eyes._ “Sh’lok,” John said, “no. Stay right where you are. Your presence is absolutely necessary. Required, even.”

“I should always wish to be where I was required,” Sh’lok said, very low, and made no move to break that gaze. “It seems logical.”

“Yes,” was all John could say for the moment. Lost, yes, he was now starting to understand the idiom about getting lost in someone’s eyes, and it came to John, not at all logically, that once he managed to really lose himself in _these_ eyes, he would never be lost again, anywhere, ever. _And I want to get started on that just as soon as I can._

His mouth was dry. With an effort he turned his head away to look out at the stars again. “Second chances, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said softly. “They tend to be few and far between.”

His Vulcan nodded. “I would say, considering the events of the day, that we’ve been…unusually fortunate.”

“And it would be a crime, don’t you think, to waste the opportunity to resume our business of, um, exploration.”

 _Oh God, listen to me. Everything I say is going to come out as a_ double entendre _now. I haven’t even started telling him what I want yet and I’ve fucked it up already._

But Sh’lok was nodding, looking out into that darkness too. “So much to investigate,” he said. “So much to discover. Endless diversity. Just waiting.”

“And in all its potential combinations,” John said. “Infinite, they tell me.”

“One must believe so.”

 _For God’s sake stop talking around it._ John cleared his throat softly. “Sh’lok…” he said.

“John.”

At the word, at the sound of it and what underlay it, John shivered, head to foot and stem to stern. He was no longer so certain whose fingers were on the strings. “I’ve been thinking, and the thought I’ve been having is that we, uh… might combine… very well.” He licked his lips. “In other modes than the, um. Official. Or the strictly intellectual. Actually, I was considering suggesting the, ah, physical. And after that, actually _along_ with that, well, maybe… more.” John swallowed with some difficulty: his mouth was dry. “What do _you_ think?”

And now all he could do was lean there against the door—glad of the support, because he was positively vibrating with terror and desire—and wait.

Sh’lok opened his mouth and closed it, glancing at John, and then down, and then away into the dark again. Finally, “Good,” he said, “I think that would be… good. I mean. That is to say…”

He seemed actually to be hunting for the right words. “Yes?” John said.

 _“Yes,”_ Sh’lok whispered. “…And also the ‘more.’”

It took John a moment to find his voice again. “All right,” he said. “Well. Then maybe we could take a quick look at one minor issue before we start exploring this together. And that would have to do with, um. Orientation…”

John trailed off as Sh’lok turned fully toward him and bent that silver-dark gaze down to meet John’s. The sheer fierce intensity of it locked John’s joints and made him wonder if possibly his bones were about to catch fire. “Let me clarify the matter then,” Sh’lok said. “My orientation is toward _you.”_

Once again John was having trouble breathing. _Just seems to be my day for that._ But he had never received so shattering a compliment from any other being in his life—and because it was this man saying it, John knew it to be true.

“Let me show you,” Sh’lok murmured. “Show me _how_ to show you.”

 _How is it possible for the damn_ deck _to vibrate when he’s not even raising his voice,_ John thought. He licked his lips again. “Oh God, _yes,”_ he said. “If you’ll promise also to show _me_ how best to show you… the _more.”_

Sh’lok bowed his head in grave assent.

John straightened himself up. _Time to get a grip now,_ and the thought instantly arose of exactly what he might soon have a chance to get a grip _on,_ _and yes, there goes some more_ double entendre _and who gives a flying fuck. I may not survive this, but what a way to die. And such an_ improvement _on the earlier one._

_But please God, let me live!_

John cleared his throat. “Sh’lok,” he said, “if you’re amenable, I think this discussion might most profitably be continued elsewhere.” He glanced upwards toward the ceiling, where there were, as they both knew quite well, visual sensors. “So let’s lock up here. And then…”

John smiled at Sh’lok. “D’you want to come back to mine?”

Sh’lok looked at him from under long dark lashes, took a deep breath, and very softly said, “Ready when you are.”

 


	6. ACT FIVE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sex between consenting Starfleet officers... and the aftermath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all... thanks again to the patient readers who have waited five months for this final chapter. You are all stars. 
> 
> Please note that with this chapter the episode's rating jumps to Explicit. (In fact, the whole series may do that, even though every other chapter besides this one is rated PG-13 at worst.) Please check the tags. 
> 
> Live long and prosper, friends!

John knew that when they made their way back up to the primary hull the corridors would be fairly quiet, though by no means empty. While ship’s evening was well along, and the corridor lighting had already dimmed down in accordance with the ship’s circadian programming, second shift was still a couple of hours from signing off to third. There would be a fair number of people about, including those who were off shift and relaxing for the evening.

Though to John it felt as if the blood was buzzing in his veins at the mere thought of what was about to happen _(please let it be about to happen!),_ this wasn’t enough to distract him from concern about his crew. His personal business couldn’t be allowed to destabilise them; their discovery of what was going on with their Captain was going to have to be thoughtfully managed. And there was also the matter of Sh’lok’s privacy, always something most carefully guarded. Having already been allowed so deep inside it, John was intent on making sure _he_ guarded it just as carefully.

But what made it difficult for him to think clearly about these problems at the moment was that John felt sure he was broadcasting HOLY FUCK AM I REALLY GOING TO GET DOWN TO IT WITH THIS AMAZING MAN? from every pore. He was exasperated with himself, he was embarrassed by himself, and he was _so bloody excited—_   _Cover a bit, cover and buy yourself time to calm down!_ John thought. _If that’s even possible—_

The hangar bay doors sealed behind them and John busied himself with keying in the locking codes. As conversationally as he could he said, “Hope Lestrade didn’t keep you all that time…”

“Ah. No.” Sh’lok sounded just the slightest bit put out, but also embarrassed. “Actually, a significant portion of it was taken up by Mrs. Hudson.”

Sh’lok’s sheepish response took John by surprise. As they made their way toward the nearest lift he learned that his Chief Engineer had been dragging his First Officer over the coals because of a procedural protocol that Sh’lok probably hadn’t known about.

He sighed, and as they went along John started to talk Sh’lok through the tangled procedural pathway required to keep Mrs. Hudson’s bureaucratic side on an even keel. Unfortunately as he took Sh’lok through the weary details of what _should_ have happened, John kept being assailed by delicious images of what might occur within the next hour or so, to the point where a couple of times he lost his thread and had to start one piece or another of the explanation all over again. And worse, Sh’lok _noticed._ John felt increasingly mortified, especially when they passed crewpeople in the corridors and even relatively innocuous glances and greetings left John feeling sure that they could tell what was going on just by looking at him.

But then, as they waited for a lift up to the primary hull, Sh’lok put everything right. “Normally, Captain,” he said, “this is the kind of tedious business we would discuss whilst engaging in other activities. Doubtless a human would see it as a form of tension relief.”

There was an odd glint in Sh’lok’s eye as his gaze slid sideways to John’s. In any other hominid being it would have resembled the precursor to a wink.

John cleared his throat. “Well,” John said. “It’s a little late for the officers’ mess, I’d say.”

“Quite right, Captain. But in my quarters—”

A sudden memory shouldered its way to the fore of when he’d gone in there, days before—of seeing the chess board set up on the shelf behind Sh’lok’s desk, and realising at least part of what its presence there meant. The warmth of the memory gave John a brief pleasant shiver of increased anticipation. “Of course, Mr. Sh’lok. Grab the set and the boards and bring ‘em along. We’ll relax for a bit, consider our next moves...”

 _Oh God still_ more _double entendre,_ John thought an instant later, _I am without any possible doubt the idiot of the week._ Yet the answer, as he slid his gaze toward Sh’lok, was that side-seen glint of eyes again: that faint curl of smile. And all of a sudden John felt the tone of what was passing between them undergo a subtle shift. They were _complicit_. This was a game, a ruse, and the two of them were in cahoots. _That_ state, one they’d been in before every now and then in the line of business, warmed John in an entirely different way. He grinned as the turbolift slowed to a stop. 

Their quarters were on the same deck, though on opposite sides of the disc, and Sh’lok’s were closer to the nearest turbolift station (where the lift deposited them now) than John’s were to his. He remembered how—decades ago, it now seemed—when he first settled in aboard _Enterprise_ , he’d started quizzing the tall dark newly-assigned quartermaster about just why this should be. Surely the Captain’s quarters should be closer to the lift than his First Officer’s? Her answer had quickly turned into a complex tangle of crowd vectors and motion studies, command priorities and algorithms, event probabilities and who knew what else. And then something interrupted the explanation… the Gorns? the Organians?… and he’d never got around to following up. Now, though, as they came to Sh’lok’s door John was privately praising Lieutenant Crossby’s punctiliousness to the skies, because it meant that much less time for Sh’lok to fetch the chess set so John could get him into his quarters and… and… _And_ what. _Oh God._

“Just wait here, Captain,” Sh’lok said, and vanished inside, leaving John leaning against the corridor wall and trying desperately to look casual, as if this was just a night like any other night.

And _failing…_ failing so hard he had to laugh out loud at himself. He felt like he was nearly vibrating out of his skin. And more, John (as he looked at that shut door) found himself up against something he had not only never permitted himself, but had been _intent_ on never permitting himself, as inappropriate between officers and especially between commander and subordinate: any serious recognition of the attractiveness— _oh come on now, admit it, the_ beauty—of the man now on the other side of that door. It was not the usual beauty by any means, but it was there, and Sh’lok’s alone… as uniquely extraordinary as everything else about him. Probably the reason that John had been (unconsciously) emphatic in refusing to acknowledge it.

 _Now,_ though… John swallowed. Now the world had shifted. Now consent had entered the equation, had been sought and given. Now something never before permissible had become not only permissible, but desirable. Shortly he was going to be able to look into Sh’lok’s eyes and tell him directly that—

John swallowed again, his mouth dry. In the meantime he was leaning there staring at a shut door in a way not at all suggestive of a starship captain operating in the usual manner. _What the hell,_ John thought after a moment, glancing at the communicator plate on the wall near him; _might as well at least_ try _to play the part_.

John turned to the wall communicator, punched the button. “Bridge.”

“Lieutenant Merivale, Captain.”

“All quiet, Ms. Merivale?”

“Yes, sir. On course for Altair as per orders.” He could hear her fingers drumming on the arm of the center seat. Merivale always did that when she was minding the Bridge: not as any sign of nervousness, as far as John could tell, but just a sign that she was alert to everything going on around her. “Mrs. Hudson’s staying up doing some fine tuning on the antimatter mix and asked us not to accelerate or decelerate from warp 2 unless there was an emergency. But there’s no other traffic nearby and nothing else whatsoever to report.”

“Very well, Lieutenant. Let’s keep it that way, shall we? Been a long day and I’m feeling my weight.”

“Aye aye, sir. Rest well.”

 _Rest, nope, don’t think rest is going to make up any part of it,_ John thought. _One way or another. Deep breath,_ deep _breath…_

Sh’lok came out of his quarters with the 3D chess set’s boards folded down and tucked under one arm, and in his hand an intricately carved and gleaming oval box for the pieces, made of what looked like some reddish wood. “Sh’lok, that’s beautiful,” John said, reaching out for it as the door to Sh’lok’s quarters shut behind him and they began to stroll down the corridor. “Is it Vulcan?”

“Not at all,” Sh’lok said, handing it to him. John rubbed his hands along the curves and abstract-looking designs of it. “It comes from Earth, from India… a souvenir of my mother’s, from when she went there to study for her first doctorate in languages.”

“Her _first_ doctorate,” John said under his breath.

Sh’lok nodded. “This was her going-away present to me when I left for Starfleet.”

John turned it over and saw, buried among the shallower curves and domes of the box’s bottom, an intricately interwoven upper-and-lowercase monogram engraved in the wood, though there were places where the carving had been chipped or splintered away, then sanded down. “‘A… G, R, A…?’”

“Amanda Grayson,” Sh’lok said.

“This looks like it had an accident somewhere along the line…”

“When I was small she told me an elephant had stepped on it,” Sh’lok said. “I have never been able to satisfactorily ascertain the veracity of this claim…”

John chuckled, handed the box back. “Your mother taught you to play?” 

“A shot in the dark,” Sh’lok said, and smiled slightly. “But a good one. She plays still at tournament level, though she does it from home…”

“Makes sense. Here, why are you carrying everything? Give me the boards. Evening, Ensign, Lieutenant…”

Side by side they ambled along around the corridor that followed the outer curve of the primary hull, greeting the various crewpeople they passed, and the conversation slid lightly and casually from family matters to the work just ahead of them. John settled a bit as they went, reflexively grounded by the familiar surroundings and the conversation, by the sound of the friend at his side seemingly so calm and collected… and then the image of the door to his quarters closing on the two of them started the adrenaline running up and down his spine once again.

 _Keep it together, not much longer now…_ John rubbed his face and looked sidelong at Sh’lok. “Seriously, Sh’lok. That one politician on Altair. _Serial trigamy?_ Tell me you were making that up.“

Sh’lok’s eyes gleamed in the low light. “John, I really must protest,” he said. “You know Vulcans do not lie.”

“Fair bit can be done with misdirection, though. Wouldn’t you say? …Mr. Polish Sicilian Level-2 Countergambit Collapsed.”

Sh’lok’s gaze slid away from his, and John saw those eyes crinkling at the corners, and the mouth twitch into an upward curl. “Mmm.” A sound of neither agreement or denial, but certainly one of amusement, and as dark as a panther’s purr. “…In any case, who are we to judge?”

 _“You_ were judging,” John said with a chuckle. “Fairly hard, actually.”

“If I find it unwise, or at the very least challenging, for a being to engage in politics who has so much trouble working within his system’s norms,” Sh’lok said, “and I say ‘his’ as an approximation—who at the same time is meant to express or uphold those norms to other species who might become confused by what seem mixed messages—”

And around the curve of the corridor, John saw his door. “Yes,” John said, nodding “good evening” to a last couple of passing crewmen, “I suppose that could be a problem, going forward…” _Forward. Oh yes._

John reached the door first, touched it open. “But not a problem for _us,_ anyway,” he said. “Thank goodness…”

He stepped inside, holding still for a moment to adapt; his quarters’ ambient lighting was even dimmer, this time of night, than the corridors’. John stepped aside to let Sh’lok in past him. A warm shadow, Sh’lok brushed by.

The door closed behind them, sealing away the brighter light outside. John heard the unmistakable sound of a breath being let out. _Not just mine,_ John thought.

“All right, these pieces of equipment’ve served their purpose,” John said, and chuckled, putting the boards down on his desk. “But for the moment they’re probably surplus to requirements. Here…” John reached out and touched Sh’lok’s elbow to turn him toward him so he could take the chess set’s box.

Sh’lok went quite still.

John paused, then squeezed the elbow gently. “You always do that,” he murmured.

Sh’lok swallowed, looked down. “For Vulcans,” he said, and stopped and swallowed again. “Where techniques like the mindmeld are possible—indeed are sunk deep in the culture—for us, touch, specifically touch initiated with the hands or sustained by them, is very much equated with intimacy, and—”

John froze. _Oh God what have I done,_ he thought, _how long have I been getting this wrong? I always thought he didn’t mind, that he kind of liked—_ He started to let go, opening his mouth to apologize.

But Sh’lok shook his head urgently and put his free hand over John’s, holding it in place. “John, no,” Sh’lok said, very low. “While it’s true that early on we learn when among non-Vulcans to discourage those around us from casual touch, those who might not understand the cultural context—”

“You’ve never discouraged _me,”_ John said.

Their eyes met. “No,” Sh’lok said.

The naked vulnerability in that gaze, usually so cool and self-assured, threatened to take John’s breath away.

“There was some concern when I was small,” Sh’lok said quietly, looking down and away after a moment. “Part of the speculation due to my human heredity. Would I manage any touch-empathy or touch-telepathy at all, even be able to manage the mind linkage for my pledging? Maybe I’d be psychically disadvantaged, along with all my other… challenges. But then it turned out that not only did I _not_ have a problem with it, I was better at it than most. _More_ sensitive than most, not less. And quite soon the children I studied with realised that. They used to plot to find excuses to touch me, in order for me to feel how much they disliked me.”

The misery encapsulated within this revelation, and the stony shell of unhappy resignation accreted around it—worn down smooth by who knew how many years of the memory being turned over and over in this man’s mind—left John simultaneously terrified to say anything and terrified _not_ to. But his mouth was apparently less terrified than the rest of him. “Oh _Sh’lok,”_ John said. “Bloody _kids!_ That’s horrible.”

Sh’lok straightened himself. “Yet salutary,” he said. “An early suggestion of a path forward. I discovered how to mirror straight back to them the negative emotions they wished _me_ to feel. Once I mastered this tactic, few wished to perceive more than once their inner selves as I saw them under such circumstances. Quickly they abandoned that tactic and moved on to others less personally painful. But I realized then that it was possible my differences made me stronger than anyone knew. And off my own planet, out among the aliens, journeying, learning, who knew how strong I might become? So….”

“Starfleet,” John said.

Sh’lok nodded. “Once in Fleet, when not on Vulcan-majority ships, the reputation of Vulcans for remoteness and reserve protected me from casual touch. As did Fleet norms and habits of conduct among humans and similar species for whom touch is also an issue. But then, at last, came _Enterprise._ And her captain, who from the first was a law unto himself.”

John felt the heat rising to his face. Yet he was finding it hard to care about that, because Sh’lok was not letting his hand go; was, in fact, pressing it against him.

“I like feeling you think,” Sh’lok whispered, dropping his gaze to that hand, and slowly, hesitantly beginning to stroke the back of it with his thumb. “…Or feeling you _feel._ And have from the day you first helped me up off the floor and were thinking no less of me for having been there. Thought’s hard to catch with such fleeting contact, but the way you wear your emotions—not always easily; but with such _certainty_ —” He swallowed again. “So when you reach out to me, and touch… if I hold still, it’s because the longer the moment lasts, the less I… That is to say…”

He trailed off.

“Sh’lok,” John said.

His Vulcan looked down at him.

“Chess set,” John said.

Sh’lok opened and shut his mouth, then let go of John so he could take the box away.

John took it and put it down on the desk, then turned back to Sh’lok. “Come here,” he said, “and feel what I’m thinking now. Or what I’m feeling. And let it last just as long as you want.”

Their eyes met. Once again as Sh’lok turned fully toward him John was locked in place by that dark look, silver-blue around the edges but going darker by the moment as uncertainty slowly vanished from it and something deep and potent began flowing into its place. At least partly to support himself, John brought his hands up and gently took hold of Sh’lok’s upper arms.

Sh’lok swallowed at the touch, but didn’t move otherwise. “As long as I want,” he said, “could be quite a long time.”

John quirked an eyebrow at him. “Going to take us at least thirty-six hours to get to Altair VI, Sh’lok…”

“At our present speed,” Sh’lok murmured, “thirty-eight hours, eighteen minutes, twelve seconds…”

John smiled. “Better still. Might as well make best use of them.”

They stood there nearly chest to chest for a few breaths. Normally in a situation like this, where he found himself staring at his First Officer’s sternum and had to tilt his head back to meet his eyes and get on with business, John would have made a joke of it— the way he sometimes chose to tease Sh’lok when he chose to loom over his Captain to get his attention. _But there hasn’t ever really_ been _a situation like this,_ John thought. And right now he found the difference in their heights to be the last thing on his mind. It was as if while John was touching Sh’lok, all the urgency, all the uncertainty, all the nerves, had begun falling away from him like a shed garment; as if something was saying to him, _Let it all go. It’s just the two of us now. There’s nothing else to do or say, nothing else to take care of, nowhere to be but here. Let go._

Because there was one last thing to let go of, and the yearning to allow that final burden to slide away, even if just for a little while, became suddenly overwhelming. It was easy for John to forget sometimes how his command of _Enterprise_ kept him, for almost all his waking hours, in the role of guardian, protector, defender of all the lives inside her. John couldn’t think when he’d last been able, especially in a moment this intimate, to let himself relax into being the protected.

 _But he knows the burden too. Shares it with me. Bears it at my side, sometimes when I can’t. And how many times has he protected_ me _, saved_ my _life as well as the crew’s? Let him know that you choose that protection. That you welcome it._

John breathed in, breathed out… then gave in and just let go, leaning in and closing his eyes and bowing his head so that his forehead rested against Sh’lok’s chest.

 _Warm,_ was his first thought. _So warm._ But then considering where they’d spent part of their day, John found it completely appropriate that Sh’lok should run a bit hot. _And the scent of him!_ John inhaled. _He smells… spicy?_ It was a subdued scent, subtle, a bit dark, hard to pin down in terms of what else it was like. It reminded John a bit of the fragrance of that hot wind that had swept past them as he and Sh’lok and Lestrade had walked across the stony natural bridge to the Place of Marriage and Challenge— rich but also sharp, laden with distant complexities; alien but tantalising.

John just stood there breathing that scent for a little, eyes still closed, resting himself against Sh’lok’s silent solidity. Odd to feel no heartbeat under his forehead; but then it was lower down. John let his hands slip downward, sliding down around Sh’lok’s waist. Against the right one he could feel the heartbeat, strong, pounding, a fast fierce beat. _How unusual to feel it there,_ John thought. _Except everything else about this man is unusual. Extraordinary. Amazing. So this absolutely fits._

After a few moments Sh’lok started to work out what to do with his own arms, slipping one slowly around John’s shoulders, the other hand sliding up behind John’s head to hold it gently against him. A few seconds later John realised that his Vulcan had bowed his head to press his cheek against the top of John’s head. He stroked his face just slightly against John’s hair, and then rested it there with a long outward breath—as if it was somewhere he’d wanted to be for a very long time.

John closed his eyes and let the moment spin out. _Nothing to do. Just be_. _Be here._

 _Be here with_ him.

To his own astonishment John found himself trembling. But though the two of them were hardly moving, this was powerful stuff. Now that he was held in these arms, John was realising that he had never in his life felt so centred, so _grounded_ —as if power was flowing into him through some obscure, long-open circuit that had just finally been closed. And John found himself reveling in the strength with which he was being held, as moment slid past moment and around him the air grew more charged with every breath. It was an embrace from which he had no desire to escape—which was just as well, because escape would have been impossible. He was locked inside the encircling power of arms that were holding him as if he was something vital, necessary for survival, never to be released again.

And as that embrace tightened around him John felt the hardness against his hip, and the strong thigh pressing between his own. John shivered, just once, all over, and the sudden brush of friction and pressure there between them sent a swift wave of something like fire licking up his spine.

“Sh’lok,” he breathed.

“John.” As if the one bare word was all that was needed, as if it spoke volumes.

John lifted his head, tilted it back to gaze up into those eyes. The silver in them was reduced to a slivery new-moon’s edge now, and something else was showing its edge there too, something more perilous. _In the distant past, Vulcans killed to win their mates,_ John had said to Lestrade, so casually. He’d never given any thought to what it might look like to be the mate who had been won, to see what he saw now in the winner’s eyes. Mere ‘possessiveness’ was a poor sort of word for it. Plainly it intended to run much deeper. _And when a mindlock between children is how this usually_ starts… _what will it look like in its culmination, in adults?_

He shivered again as adrenaline-heat flared in his blood at the thought of the danger, the challenge, in this most intimate of personal arenas to which any access would have seemed unthinkable as recently as just this morning. And then John caught himself. _Tell the truth._ Not _unthinkable. You’ve thought about it before and pushed the idea away. But it didn’t seem possible then. It is now._

 _So. Into battle._ And he had to smile a somewhat fierce half-smile, because if things went properly, this battle they would both win.

“Sh’lok,” John said, quite softly. “Do Vulcans kiss?”

The answer was slow in coming back. “I have observed my father doing so,” Sh’lok said, very low. “When he thought no one could see. But then his circumstances are unique. As regards Vulcans in general, however, the behavior seems to lack even narrow cultural currency, and my data sample is essentially a null set.”

“Mmm.” John nodded. “Okay. Interested in expanding that sample a bit…from the inside?”

“Additional data…” that dark voice said, dropping even lower, “is always desirable for optimal results. And most valuable when acquired first-hand...”

John felt the rumble of the words in his chest, and in response a wash of excitement and heat ran about under his skin as if he’d brought one of those fierce hot winds back from Vulcan with him. He swallowed. Then, slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on the silver-dark ones above him, John reached his left hand up to touch Sh’lok’s cheek.

Those eyes drifted shut and Sh’lok leaned into the touch, his lips parting just slightly. John could not bear to hold still a single second longer. “Come here,” he whispered, and pulled that beautiful face down to meet his.

The lips he brushed with his own were so soft, and oh _yes,_ receptive… but aside from that slight parting, through which Sh’lok was breathing John’s breath, Sh’lok’s mouth touched only hesitantly against John’s. And though it met John’s lips without avoidance as John’s stroked his, otherwise it held so still. Apparently that seemingly inexhaustible hypercompetence did have limits. 

John had limits of his own, and he was right up against them; but he was still in command… just. He needed to make absolutely sure this was all right. _“Sh’lok,”_ John said, and his voice actually cracked on the word.  

Sh’lok took a breath but didn’t move away, not so much as a millimeter. When he managed to speak, his voice was husky with longing too, yet also abashed. “I am afraid I may have…” He paused, as if for the most embarrassing admission he could possibly make. “…Insufficient expertise for this.”

John’s heart didn’t quite break on hearing that. The sensation was more like a stretching, preparatory to making room for something much bigger than had been there before… painful, but sweet. In any case, there was only one possible response.

“Here,” John said. “Use mine.”

And he reached back to gently loosen the grip of the hand that Sh’lok had wrapped around the back of his neck, drawing it around and forward to his face. John turned his head enough to press his lips to the knuckles of that hand, and then turned it to settle its fingers against his own cheek, laying his own hand over it.

He felt Sh’lok catching his breath—desire and astonishment and half-disbelieving joy all winding together for one second, two… Then certainty broke through. Then the fingers moved fractionally against John’s face, slid to the places where they needed to be, pressed gently in. 

John closed his eyes and braced himself to deal with the shock he remembered from sigma Draconis VI, the sudden flinch-back-from-a-burn reaction at feeling, directly, the touch of another mind. But it didn’t come. What did come was a strangely pleasant sense, creeping along John’s nerves, of what he was doing with _his_ hands, the flush under _his_ skin: the slight tingle of his mouth where it had pressed, even so briefly, against Sh’lok’s… _as felt by someone else._

John blinked. _That… is just…_ amazing!

And now everything started slotting into place, and he knew exactly what to do… because they were truly together in this, more together than he’d ever believed possible. _Okay,_ John thought. _Let’s consider the business of kissing, shall we?_

He drew Sh’lok’s face close again, tilting the opposite way from the usual so as to be out of the way of the fingers. _Lips…_ He stroked Sh’lok’s softly with his, and the hair went up on the back of his neck with unnerved delight as with the very first touch he not only felt himself kissing Sh’lok, but felt Sh’lok _feeling_ him kissing him. Felt Sh’lok’s astonishment, his hunger, his burgeoning arousal. _From inside._

It was a far more profound shock than anything that had happened at sigma Draconis. “Oh, that is…” John actually had to stop and gasp for breath. “Fantastic!”

Sh’lok was trembling in his arms… but John could feel him smiling. _From the inside._ Delighted. _Very_ aroused. Just a touch mischievous. And _so hungry._

“Do you know you do that out loud?” those lips breathed against his.

“Yep. Going to do it some more, too,” John whispered, smiling back. “So stay with me here.”

Taking the upper lip between his, now. Ever so gently sucking at it. Letting it go and then finally, finally coming to grips with that luscious-looking lower lip. Stroking it in turn… then just the briefest nip. Not enough ever to hurt, just enough to get the tissue’s attention, bring the blood in a bit, heighten the sensitivity. _And then the tongue, see, like this. But always as a question, never as a demand, not so early, not when everything’s so new. Just a touch here to start with, a soft suggestion. Then a little, little bit of a slide. Something that says_ May I come in? May I please? Say yes. _It’s a dance. Every step. One says_ May I? _And the other, if it’s all right, says_ Yes. _And the more times you ask and answer, the more intimate the dance becomes. A discussion. A conversation._

 _…An intercourse,_ said the other part of him, deep and dark and deliciously low.

John shivered all over with delight, closed his eyes, sank into the kiss. Sank into _being_ kissed, now, for someone else was in the kiss with him, kissing him back, his own technique turned back on him but with something completely new and different added… and he was able to feel it _from both sides_. And so could the other!

 _Oh dear_ God _this is the best thing in the world._

 _Except if_ this _is like this…_

 _…what_ else _might be like this?!_

_It’s going to be so worth finding out…_

John was having trouble working out whether all those thoughts were his, or whose voice was whose, or where it was coming from. At the moment the issue was starting to seem surprisingly unimportant. _There’s kissing going on, and I’m in the middle of it. And it is_ fantastic! Because his partner was looking down into him, into what suddenly seemed a large warm shadowy space labeled OSCULATION: VARIANTS, and was moving through that space, reaching out as he passed them into various specific dark soft wet tangles of sense-memory, choosing one here and another there, disentangling them, testing, tasting, analysing, then tangling them together again into some new shape or configuration that John had never in his life even considered. And then suddenly that configuration was unfurling inside him, his own lips parting to welcome its implementation in;  the touch and taste of someone both alien and utterly familiar, slipping past John’s lips to delightfully invade him, to be softly and irresistibly mastered by, delightedly submitted to…

 _Oh God. Oh_ God _yes. Oh God_ more! John felt like he could have actually swooned with the sheer unbridled bliss of it, except he was gripping Sh’lok too hard to do anything but take him down with him if he did any swooning, and anyway he could feel the wave of pleasure overtaking Sh’lok too, his own _and_ John’s pleasure at the same time, almost too much for him to bear. _Except once you get used to this, I’m betting you’ll find you can bear a whole lot more. So let’s find out._

And as Sh’lok had slipped into him, so John went in; went deep.

The interest in kissing was a gateway to much more, he quickly found. Simply thinking of the subject of sex immediately exposed John to a veritable sandstorm of Vulcan erotic imagery and usage. Mostly this seemed very hand-oriented, and beyond that lay a whole school of behaviours involving the management of the skin, the body’s _whole_ skin, as a sex organ—for which the hands themselves routinely stood in as a symbol. But the hands as erogenes were also deeply specialised, the fount of a whole school of subtle and involved symbolisms—most of them millennia old, deeply ingrained and interwoven with Vulcan physiological and psychological structure and reaction, and encrusted with endless rich and complex inter- and intracultural variations.

John found himself browsing through a whole sheaf of exquisitely suggestive imageries; fingers stroking together, their erogenous microzones carefully catalogued and mapped for potential levels of arousal, _oh indeed, who’d have thought of_ that _, definitely some possibilities_ there _, making notes now…_ It was all so _organized_ , though. Everything carefully sorted, ranked, evaluated… _By someone who plainly thought a_ whole _lot about this when he was younger,_ John thought. And all this tucked away within the depths of a mind that lived so carefully hidden inside the outward semblance of ignoring one’s body as nothing but a means of transport. _Yeah,_ John thought, _I give_ that _five more minutes, tops. Just you wait._

Just the hand he was holding against him, now, while Sh’lok’s tongue moved sweetly against his: there were endless possibilities there. Years of experience in the art of how to be doing something else while he was also kissing meant John had no problem at all with delicately removing his hand from on top of Sh’lok’s, and then descending again with just the index and middle fingers, pressed together, and stroking them along the inward side of Sh’lok’s index finger and down to the soft vee of flesh between it and the middle finger. Then he stroked from that vee upward toward the knuckle and _pressed,_ because pressing at just that angle and with just that pressure meant—

Sh’lok groaned into his mouth, a sound both of surprise and of desperate ravenous arousal, and clutched John to him almost convulsively, staggering. John felt Sh’lok’s knees actually going wobbly, and braced him. _Yes,_ John said wordlessly as he took back the initiative and his tongue slid and stroked against Sh’lok’s, slow and deep and luxurious, _oh yes, just you wait. If you want that, then believe me, I’m going to give it to you. All you have to do is ask. All you have to do is tell me what you want, and it’s yours._

There was a pause before any answer became apparent through the sweet dark union that had begun welling up between them as the mindmeld fully established. But finally all that shared space throbbed with one word, one thought: _You._

 _Done,_ John said. _Yours._ He smiled against the mouth he kissed. _Hormones are still running pretty high, I bet._ John nipped that lower lip just a little harder. _How about… we play…_ pon farr?

Sh’lok gasped as deep and ragged as if breath had just been invented, just for him. _Oh John...!_

It was most diagnostic. _Because just_ w _hat_ does _a couple do after that,_ John said softly, as if into Sh’lok’s ear, _when it actually goes off as planned? Go out for drinks? A night out on the town? Or something more… immediate?_

“Immediate” turned out to be an accurate description of the flood of imagery that came tumbling down over them. And lip-nipping looked like the very least of it. Apparently this was a situation in which the demure touching and stroking of fingers and palms were set aside in favour of strategies far more robust. John was briefly blinded by an image-storm of grasping hands, grappling limbs, bared teeth, bodies and parts of bodies that thrust and clasped and pinned down and rolled together and penetrated and ensheathed—

John had to struggle a bit for stability amid the storm of images, so that context could follow. When it did he was glad, for the major sexual symbolisms of power and control among the Vulcan cultures were far differently constituted than they were among many cultures of Earth. In the Vulcan procreative act and the other sexual and erotic acts derived from it, it was the one who _surrounded_ and _contained_ who was seen as the controlling partner—possibly a vestigial point of view dating back to times when control of mate-choice vested in a clan matriarch, and the one who controlled fertility was the mother-to-be. The one who entered the childbearer to be contained within them was the supplicant, totally subject to their acceptance and consent. Only the one who chose to be pierced and filled, only the one who accepted the other in, could grant the other a home.

Something in that understanding struck John sharp as a spear, straight to his core. In answer a desperate desire to _be_ that one, to _be Sh’lok’s home_ , came welling up out of John’s depths like water, paradoxically engendering a great thirst in him. _I could do that, let me be that, God yes—_

John gasped as he lost control a bit and all the _pon farr_ imagery flooded over him again, especially the being-pierced and ensheathing bits. Even if he’d never done that before, he’d have been more than ready for it now. _Oh yes,_ John said silently to Sh’lok, _I can get behind that. Every bit of it._

Only _‘behind’ it, John?_

There it was again, the mischief. Apparently he was not going to be alone any more as regarded the _double entendre—_ which suited John just fine. _Come find out,_ he said. _I think you might find me surprisingly… receptive._

Thought and intention and action were getting all run together at the moment, much as the shadowy shared mindspace enfolding John and Sh’lok was blending around the edges with the shadows in John’s quarters. But there was no mistaking the soft dark chuckle that followed for anything but actual sound, and warm breath in John’s ear to go with it. Hands were stroking down his back, big warm strong hands, and John gasped softly, his back arching as he leaned back into them, as they slid further down further and found his arse… cupping it from both sides, squeezing it, fingers brushing inwards to stroke against the cleft that led down to another area of interest. _Oh my,_ he thought. Someone’s uncertainty had definitely faded into the background when expertise was no longer an issue…

The thought of those hands against _bare_ skin made John shimmy a little where he stood. “How would you feel,” he said out loud, because hearing Sh’lok in his head was growing exponentially more sexy every moment and John wasn’t yet sure he might not go off prematurely, “about less clothes?”

“I take it we are discussing the prospect in the personal and particular mode,” Sh’lok said, “and not the general.”

John snickered. “You take it correctly.”

“Good,” Sh’lok said… and then those warm long-fingered hands were sliding up under the back of John’s uniform tunic. “For I think that prospect would positively… _stimulate_ … our conversation.”

Even just used conventionally, the soft rough growl of that voice was well beyond merely arousing. _In fact it’s kind of a good thing I’ve never heard him sound like that before,_ John thought. _Because if I’d heard it without any warning I might have just turned right around and pulled the uniform off him. And wouldn’t_ that _have caused talk on the Bridge?_

Meantime John got busy with pulling it off him right now: the top half of it, anyway. He knew in a general way what he would find—taut musculature, whipcord-tight. The nipples, as expected, a dark dusky moss-green… small and already tight and hard. And a sparse dark furring across the chest that narrowed and vanished enticingly down the front of the uniform trousers. At the sight of it John took a deep breath and was rewarded by a fresh lungful of Sh’lok’s dark scent, warm and enticing.

John realised that his own tunic had already taken leave of him just as he was dropping Sh’lok’s to the floor, and long, lean, strong arms were pulling him close again. Nonetheless he shivered. It was hard, even in these circumstances, to put aside the habitual nervousness about the slightly-misshapen shoulder that even the medical expertise of this day and age had never been able to perfectly repair. But then after the phaser bolt at Maiwand he’d barely even had a shoulder _left_. What was there now was frankly a masterwork built out of bone-memory-guided calciridiograft and clonilage; it would be sheerest ingratitude to resent it. And though the big overlapping patch of autoderm covering it wasn’t perfect no matter how many times John had to get it regrown, it all _worked_ just fine, better than fine, and—

“John,” Sh’lok said, reaching out to stroke the shoulder, and oh, the touch of the warm fingers there as they folded around it… For a long time John’s shoulder had been the very opposite of an erogenous zone for him; something to be eternally uneasy about, either because of a partner’s potential response to it, or the fear that without logical reason (as sometimes happened) the old pain in the joint would reawaken at the worst possible moment. But nothing of the kind stirred there now… nothing but that warmth, soaking into him from the hand that gently gripped and rubbed.

“Stop now,” Sh’lok said: and John could tell he was speaking aloud for emphasis. “This shoulder’s loss saved your life. It’s obvious from the asymmetry of the reconstruction how the blast spun you sideways and down flat, and spared your heart from the followup.” He swallowed, his fingers sliding away from the shoulder and coming gently to rest under John’s chin, tilting it up. “Never imagine it could look less than beautiful to someone whose world would be far poorer were you not in it.”

No amount of shadow could have concealed how full Sh’lok’s eyes were of this sentiment, and the shared mindspace did nothing but confirm how completely he meant it. Then Sh’lok’s mouth came down on John’s and that sweet fierce tongue drove every other thought out of his head for long moments… at least all the ones that didn’t have to do with heat and wet and longing and hardness, and all the other things one might do with them. 

John simply wallowed in that kiss until it broke enough for him to feel Sh’lok’s breaths (coming quite quickly at the moment) on his face. “Bed?” he said then, because there was really no way to get in or out of Starfleet-issue boots unless you were sitting down, and anyway his own knees were less than reliable after that last kiss. _Dammit, so bloody typical. Give him five minutes and a look around inside your head and his competence goes from zero to downright dangerous in a matter of moments…_

That chuckle again… deeper, this time. John half-melted at the sound of it. “Bed,” Sh’lok said, “by all means. Lead the way.”

For the moment they allowed their joint awareness of their bodies and the physical world around them to assert itself enough to keep them from banging into things. Past the desk they made their way—a touch awkwardly, for neither of them was willing to let go of the other—through the little opening that gave onto the bedroom part of the Captain’s suite, and the relatively narrow bed that occupied it.

Sh’lok glanced at it thoughtfully as they came up next to it together. “The bed…”

“A bit narrow in this configuration, sure, but it…”

“Doesn’t matter—”

“Morphs out.”

One eyebrow went up. “Indeed!”

“Rank hath its privileges, Sh’lok.”

“Well. Yes. Of course.”

“But so hath yours.” John’s mouth quirked up on one side. “And yours morphs out too.”

Astonishment. “Really?”

“Sh’lok. You’re this ship’s First Officer, with responsibilities and overtime hours second only to her Captain’s. If not worse! Of _course_ your damn bed morphs out. If it didn’t, I’d be having some words with whoever was responsible.” And John paused. “Wait. Haven’t you ever _tried?”_

“Ah, well. Now that you mention…”

“No?”

“…It didn’t seem _important_ , John—”

“No!”

“—after all, I don’t move at all when I’m meditating, and not that much when I sleep, and—”

“—there was never any reason to make it wider due to the presence of anyone else, was there, and so—”

A flash of momentary, cranky resignation. _There’s always something, isn’t there,_ Sh’lok said silently.

John laughed the same way, partly to see if he could. It was a strange effect, as he heard it echoed through Sh’lok’s mind (there picking up an additional frisson of enjoyment at hearing it), but it worked.

He also immediately felt Sh’lok’s confusion as well. _This is funny?_

 _Maybe not funny as_ such _, Sh’lok. But_ fun? _Yeah. And why shouldn’t it be?_

The bemusement in Sh’lok’s expression was priceless. John reached out to gather Sh’lok close, holding him in his arms and gazing smiling up into that face, so unique and so uniquely handsome. He laughed again. _Yes we may wind up so moved by what happens next that we cry, or get so turned on that we scream, who knows which, but that doesn’t mean we have to be_ serious. _I’m a starship captain whose last ten missions have included five that involved fooling people into thinking I’m all kinds of things I’m not. And I’ve been aided and abetted in that by a member of a species who’s all about not lying. ‘Serious’ seems to be only periodically applicable to our situation at best. So ‘funny’ isn’t necessarily going to break the experiential bank here, is it?_

Sh’lok gazed down into John’s eyes, his expression growing more amused but still seeming a little at sea. _Irony, at the very least,_ he rumbled, _would seem to come into play._

John shivered. _Oh God. How do you go so deep when you’re not even using your larynx,_ really—

 _I might well ask you the same. How do you go… so deep?_ Sh’lok’s gaze had gone soft and thoughtful. _In me?_

John blinked, shook his head. _By being invited, maybe?_

The gentle touch of one of those long strong hands in his hair made John moan, made him let his head lean back into that hand, to be cupped by it, held safe. _Perhaps the same, then,_ Sh’lok said. _You invite what you long for. And by the invitation, give it validity… make it real. Maybe it’s true what the ancients said: that the impossible first becomes possible by invocation. To name the hunger… makes it possible for it to be satisfied._

John took a long gasp of breath. _Sh’lok…_

_Yes._

_How can anyone discussing abstract philosophy sound_ so fucking sexy?

_Do I indeed?_

_Oh God. Feel it from my side._

_Mmmm…_

_Yes. Oh yes. See what I mean?_

Sh’lok felt a little uncertain. _Is it not—almost in its original definition,_ narcissistic— _to find_ oneself _sexy?_

_Not when the perception’s originally from another’s point of view. I’d bet you the Vulcan languages have whole syntaxes for discussing this kind of perception._

_I must admit I… never became that interested in that line of study._

John took a breath as something occurred to him (and as, a second later, did something else: that in this mode there was no use ever trying to hide the truth, for it became evident to the other the moment it became evident to oneself). _Because you never thought you’d need it,_ he said.

_…Yes._

_Well, looks like you were wrong._ And as Sh’lok, entirely out of reflex, began to bristle a bit at the very idea that he might be _wrong_ about something, John laughed and pulled him close and kissed him again, deeply, with intent to derail. _And isn’t it terrific?_

The response was a wholly illegible scramble of images that served admirably as a stand-in symbol for extreme cognitive dissonance. _Ah…_

John ignored this and concentrated on spending the next few moments sucking Sh’lok’s tongue in a gentle, insistent, rhythmic evocation of something that might happen between them, elsewhere, in the very near future. He felt Sh’lok stiffen, in more ways than one. _John…!_

John stroked Sh’lok’s tongue with his own in a slow soft swirl of promise and then backed off a little to smile against his mouth once more. _Yes?_

 _Yes_ please.

Even at his most diplomatic, “please” wasn’t a word one heard all that often from this man. John swallowed as his cock twitched emphatically in his pants. “So look,” John said, out loud again, so as to try to regain a _little_ separation while he dealt with utterly mundane things, “…the bed, yeah? There’s a spot where if you need quick access, you can just kick it. Right here—”

John kicked it, and the bed popped itself out into its full-width configuration—about the same size as a superqueen on Earth, because even starship captains didn’t get to hog _too_ much of a starship’s always-precious deck space. Despite the inbuilt elasticity of the bedclothes’ fabric, the tidily squared-away sheets still managed to get a bit pulled out of whack when the bed stretched itself out. It was a constant wonder to John that not even 23rd-century technology had so far worked out a way to deal with that. And also as usual, when the bed’s memory popped it out to full size, it whacked into his legs and nearly knocked John over sideways… because no matter how sure you were that you were standing just out of range, the bed always figured out a way to make a fool of you. 

Staggering, clinging to Sh’lok for balance, John couldn’t help laughing, because _Why this? Why right this minute?!_ And Sh’lok braced him, laughing too, smiling down into John’s eyes as the two of them quieted.

“Fun?” Sh’lok murmured.

John rolled his eyes at himself, grinned. “Fun,” he said. “Come on, Sh’lok. Boots.”

He pushed Sh’lok gently down onto the edge of the bed and was about to sit down by him when he was stopped. Sh’lok had reached out to him and slipped his arms up around John’s waist, drawing him close. His head was right at the level of John’s crotch and the harder-every-moment contents of John’s trousers; and as John looked down at him, Sh’lok leaned ever so slowly forward and buried his face against what awaited him there, his hands sliding down to squeeze John’s arse.

Breath hissed out of John at the thought of what it would be like when those trousers were gone, when that mouth—now breathing warmly on him through the cloth—would be able to have its way with him without any barriers being present. But even as he was reaching down to press Sh’lok’s face more closely against him, Sh’lok let him go, looking up at John with eyes both dilated to near-complete darkness and brimming with mischief. “My apologies,” he said. “I was consulting some of your experiential and technique-related resources, and I became…” He cleared his throat. “Distracted.”

“Good,” John said with a slow smile. “I look forward to showing you just how much more distracted you can get.”

 Sh’lok straightened and pushed away, bending over to industriously start working on one boot, and leaving John very much feeling the loss of his breath’s warmth through his trousers. “And as for you,” John said, sitting down beside him, “you have a wicked streak. How is it I’ve never noticed before?”

“John, if you will continue to see but not observe—” Then Sh’lok’s eyes closed and his head tipped back, his mouth dropping open, as John’s left hand settled itself softly right on Sh’lok’s crotch. A small gasp of pleasure escaped Sh’lok as John stroked the good-sized package that was twitching under his hand, growing harder by the moment… indeed, just _growing._

Ever so gently John squeezed what he felt hardening under his touch, and stroked and squeezed again until he felt Sh’lok buck up against against his hand, pressing into it. John promptly took the hand away. “You’ll doubtless have observed that I have an evil streak to match, then,” he murmured. “Better watch out…”

Grinning to himself, John bent over to start getting his own boots off, considering that he couldn’t think of a single time when the act had seemed so ridiculously, sensually _loaded._ And also— As he was pulling his second one off, he glanced sideways to see how Sh’lok was getting on, and realised suddenly as the man finished peeling off his socks that he’d never really noticed how _long_ Sh’lok’s feet were. Considering them whilst getting rid of his own socks, John grinned a slightly different grin.

Sh’lok caught his amusement. _Funny?_ his mind said, just a touch uncertainly, into the silence between them.

_Well. There’s a metric in some cultures on Earth…about feet and the size of… other body parts…._

_Oh indeed,_ Sh’lok said. _You shall judge its cross-cultural validity, then._

Did he sound just the _slightest_ bit smug? _Oh God,_ John thought, his mouth starting to water. _What am I in for…?_

 _If I have anything to say about it,_ Sh’lok said, _a great deal._ Yet even through his eagerness John caught that continuing slight sense of uncertainty, as if Sh’lok wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed.

John locked eyes with him and started undoing his flies, touching the closure unfastened and stroking one finger down it to reveal what lay beneath. The stretchy black synsilk of his pants was under considerable strain in the front, and as Sh’lok’s gaze dropped to take in the view, John smiled. _Some metrics, of course,_ he said, _are less reliable than others…_

 _The way you walk,_ Sh’lok said, sounding a bit throaty and rough even in his mind, and not looking away from John’s flies, _would be something of a diagnostic in this particular regard…_

John hitched himself up enough off the bed to get his trousers slid down, then kicked them to the floor and turned to half-face Sh’lok. For a second or three John sat there with one leg now partially up on the bed and bent at the knee, his crotch angled toward the man who still sat gazing down at it, his thumbs hooked into the waistband of his own trousers, seemingly forgotten.

“So…?” John said.  

Sh’lok licked his lips, blinking slowly.

John tilted his head to one side and did his best to listen to the mindspace around them. What he got was a general sense of wonder and desire, but at the moment it seemed to be running in a loop, as if Sh’lok wasn’t quite sure where to go from here.

“Sh’lok,” John said softly.

Sh’lok’s eyes came up to meet John’s.

“Let me help,” John said. “Yeah?”

Sh’lok nodded, and then blushed, hard.

John slid himself closer, so that their chests were just a few inches apart, and rested his hands on Sh’lok’s. _Expertise deficit again?_ John thought. _Nothing to be embarrassed about. Just_ having _the data doesn’t mean you can always work out what to do with it right away._

Sh’lok nodded again.

John stroked those hands with his—not in any of the potentially arousing Vulcan modes, but simply with intent to calm. “Shall we have these off then?” John said. “…Or not, if you don’t want to.”

Sh’lok turned his hands palm-up to take John’s, then pressed them against him. _I want…_ you _to._

John leaned his head forward so that his forehead touched Sh’lok’s, and the two of them were looking downward together. Slowly and with care, John undid Sh’lok’s flies, laid them open. His pants were identical to John’s, the standard black Starfleet uniform issue; and under them he was very, very hard.

“I really, really want to investigate the contents of these further,” John said. “But right now…” He stroked his face against Sh’lok’s. “I’m willing to wait. Because your mouth…” He shook his head a little, let out one breath’s worth of desperately yearning laugh. “Oh, God, your mouth. Here, boost up a little, we’ll get rid of these…”

Sh’lok lifted himself up a bit, and John eased his trousers off him and down, tossing them over on top of his own; then settled himself close to Sh’lok again.

“…And your eyes,” he found himself saying after a moment as he looked into them. “You’ve looked at me a thousand different ways, but I didn’t ever think… Until today, until maybe a couple of hours ago I didn’t _dare_ think—”

“For just a moment,” Sh’lok said, very low, “I couldn’t believe it. Despite all the evidence to the contrary. Despite— There’s no _logic_ in it, but I—”

John took a deep breath, reaching up to Sh’lok’s face again and touching it—letting Sh’lok’s sense-memory speak to his own muscles and show him where to touch to reinforce the mindmeld, to let John drop more deeply into that shadowy silence in which they could each hear each other’s hearts, and the truth in them. _You’re so important to me,_ John said. _Let me show you, instead of just telling you. And as for whatever you might show me… there’s no way for you to do it wrong, Sh’lok. Anything you give me is a gift, something I’ll treasure. Let me—_

 _Let me,_ Sh’lok said, simultaneously, reaching out for John as John reached for him. They drew each other close, sliding arms around one another, and their mouths met again.

The kissing was if possible sweeter now than the first time, made so by the passing awkwardness; and possibly also helped by the relief at having had such a moment and gotten through it. The quality of the kisses had changed too; it was less about expertise, more about relaxing into the sensation. Maybe Sh’lok had had a little more time to internalise what he’d picked up from John, and maybe John was a little better at relaxing into it. _Sweet, though, so good, so sweet, oh God I love having this with you,_ John thought, as lips parted and tongues touched and tasted one another, asserting, inviting, teasing, while hands stroked faces and necks and shoulders and chests and held one another close. 

It lasted a good while, the kissing, the touching. _Nowhere else to go. Nothing else to do. Just this. And eventually, other things…_ But there was no hurry. There was time. Throats were kissed, nuzzled, stroked with fingers and tongues. Pulses were sucked. Eyes were kissed closed, and kissed again. (John’s breath failed him once or twice while that was going on; to know those sharp bright eyes to be closed willingly under the touch of his lips as he cupped Sh’lok’s face in his hands was a dream he hadn’t known he’d had until it suddenly came true.) And somewhere along the line after that, John did something he’d secretly wanted to do for some time. He reached up to touch and stroke that smooth shining hair. It was like silk or glass under his fingers… for the first few moments.

Then something happened. The hair changed texture, and Sh’lok stiffened.

It took John a moment to work out what had occurred. The hair he was touching had not only suddenly stopped being smooth, but John found himself stroking something thicker, springier, deeper-textured… He realised he had a handful of short but unmistakable _curls_.

 _How the…!_ But a second later he didn’t care that he didn’t understand what had happened. The softness of the loose curls and waves was irresistible, and John slid his fingers through them in delight. _Sh’lok._ Your hair!

 _Is it…_ John could feel his uncertainty again, as if Sh’lok was sure this wasn’t going to be all right for some reason. _Acceptable?_

 _What? That it’s_ curly? _That’s_ wonderful! _I didn’t know Vulcans’ hair could even_ be _like this! We always see it straight. And cut that way, or a lot like that, on men._

 _Yes,_ Sh’lok said, becoming somewhat annoyed now, though not at John. _The cultural pressure to have a traditional hairstyle is considerable. And more pronounced still if one is in any way… different._

John could believe it, because he’d never once seen any male Vulcan looking any other way. _How do you—_

 _Each day after showering I use a time-keyed and touch-resistive keratocortical restructuring balm._ Sh’lok’s embarrassment at this revelation was considerable.

John shrugged. _Product,_ he said. _Everybody uses product!_ I _use product. But this! These_ curls _._ He slid his fingers through them in unabashed admiration, gently rubbing Sh’lok’s scalp. Sh’lok pushed back against the massage, humming softly, almost a purr. _To think these have been hidden in plain sight all this while,_ John said. _I love these!_ And he did. The look of them softened the somewhat austere angles of Sh’lok’s face and made him look if possible even handsomer.

 _I hated them for a long time,_ Sh’lok said after a moment.

John understood immediately. _Those kids again._

Sh’lok sighed, nodded. _But if_ you _like it—_

John pulled Sh’lok’s head close to his again and buried his face in the softness, in which Sh’lok’s warm scent clung. _I bet no one on this ship has ever seen you like this but me._

He could feel, both physically and mentally, the cocked eyebrow, and could intuit the wry (implied) glance at the two of them, their surroundings, and their present condition. _I feel safe in suggesting that you would win that bet._

John snickered. _And let’s make it a winning streak, hmm? I bet nobody on this ship but me is ever going to feel you rub these curls around on their naked body._ The image summoned the sensation, and John could feel it already. Parts of him immediately went even stiffer than they already were at the very thought. In haste he added, _Providing, of course, that_ _you think maybe that’s something you’d like to do—_

Sh’lok swallowed. Instantly John felt how very much Sh’lok _would._ Nonetheless he then said _, For one to answer most directly,_ he said _, it would seem necessary to get the bodies naked._

John rubbed himself against Sh’lok, almost giddy with excitement and a bit amused by it as well; the mischief that kept surfacing in Sh’lok’s mind was bleeding over into him. _Well, show some initiative, mister!_ he said, and bit Sh’lok’s earlobe.

Sh’lok groaned out loud and fell back on the bed, pulling John down on top of him. Seconds later John too was groaning in extravagant pleasure as those big warm hands slid under his pants, cupped his arse cheeks, brushed fingertips inward again… _Dear God,_ John thought, _yes yes yes…!_

John pushed himself up enough so that Sh’lok had room to work in front, while nipping in a teasing way at a handy collarbone. He breathed out in relief when his cock was finally free and Sh’lok was pushing his pants down his thighs.

It took a certain amount of wriggling and shifting around for John to get the pants far enough down his legs to be kicked away. But when he managed that he realised that Sh’lok was rubbing himself against him just as unsubtly as he’d been doing with Sh’lok, his Vulcan now quite eager to get rid of his own pants but apparently unwilling to spare a hand for the task. John laughed and got up on his knees over Sh’lok. _Here, let me help…_

Sh’lok chuckled in John’s ear and then gasped softly as fingers slid under the waistband of his pants. But there was no uncertainty in his mind now, none at all. John eased the stretchy synsilk away from Sh’lok’s groin, slid the pants carefully down. _Ohh…_

Sh’lok’s penis, full and hard, rose up toward John when it was freed and then settled to lie angled over the well-defined muscles of his belly, quivering gently with his pulse. It was nearly as thick as John’s, though a bit longer, standing up with a slight inward curve from beautiful heavy testicles lightly furred with black hair, and shading from a pale ivory-green at the root to a soft olive at the head. The foreskin seemed ampler  than John’s and longer as well, with a faintly visible ridge hinting at the frenulum beneath. The whole effect was most appealing, as long and elegant as the rest of the man.

John’s mouth began to water. “Oh, _look_ at you,” he said softly. And then gasped, for Sh’lok’s hand had found his way up to John’s cock as John was reaching for his.

_Yes?_

_Of_ course _yes—_

Please _yes—_

_Yes!_

Again that brief confusion (in so physically charged a moment) over who was saying what, while each of them was still getting used to mind touching mind in this most intimate mode. But it was all _yes_. Moments later John threw his head back with his eyes squeezed shut and lost everything but the sense of that big hand first wrapping softly around him, then more tightly, stroking. And the mind _his_ touched was coming hotly alight with the touch of John’s hand, any kind of organised thought simply becoming unavailable with the intensity of it, the hunger increasing as it was fed. 

John managed to lower himself to the bed next to Sh’lok, on his side, and threw his unoccupied arm around Sh’lok’s back to roll him over, pull them together. Their difference in height was mostly a matter of the differing lengths of their legs, but their torsos were a better match, and in very short order their two cocks were pressed together and their two hands were stroking them.

Here the mindmeld most thoroughly proved its usefulness, for John got so lost in the exquisite feel of Sh’lok’s hand working him that words were turning out to be hard to find. Not least because of the astounding synesthesia—if that was the word for it—when you found yourself feeling what the other felt, and felt _them_ feeling _you_. There was a hall-of-mirrors quality to it that initially was easy to get lost in, John was finding… until one party or the other did something new or intense that shocked the other back into the immediacy of the foreground of feeling.

Which happened now as Sh’lok was concentrating on how they stroked each other, submerged deep in the pleasure while comparing and contrasting their two cocks, having recovered himself just enough to do a little analysis… until John’s mouth found one of Sh’lok’s nipples and began to kiss and tease it. Now it was Sh’lok’s turn to throw his head back in abandon, lost in a sensation he had only ever imagined, now come real. 

Sh’lok’s spare hand slid around to find John’s face again, along with the pressure points where the meld could be controlled and deepened or brought into sharper focus. _Oh John… this is so_ good!

 _And not just because of the physical end of it,_ John said, looking deeply into those gorgeous eyes, so dark in the dim-lit room when they opened again and locked on his. _But because this is an extension of something that was already there. A completion._ He smiled. _One might even say, the carrying through of something to its_ logical _conclusion._

Sh’lok shivered against John as if unexpectedly assailed by something delectable. John grinned. _Logic,_ he said silently. _It’s a turn-on, yeah? Tell me that Vulcans recite each other syllogisms or something like that when they’re doing it._

The smile Sh’lok turned on John had a fair amount of naughtiness lurking in it, and John could “hear” a quick faint drift of something very mathematical and ordered rippling by in the depths of Sh’lok’s mind, like a gossamer veil blown in the wind, stroking over the skin and innocently caressing it in passing. _What they enjoy, they share,_ Sh’lok said. _And because of our cultural background, logic is joy to most of us. So of course it can enter into some modes of intimacy… even in itself becoming arousing. I believe a phrase evocative of the phenomenon for humans in such a situation might be, ‘I love it when you talk dirty.’_

John chuckled. _I’ll have to brush up on my set theory, then._

 _No need,_ Sh’lok said. _I would say you have erotic modes in which you excel far beyond the mathematical._ With the backs of his fingers he stroked John’s face, his gaze dropping to John’s lips, as his other hand closed around the head of John’s cock and most gently stroked the foreskin back. _And perhaps in those… you’d be willing to bring my proficiency up to speed._

John brought his free hand around to tangle its fingers in that soft hair. _Willing?_ he said into Sh’lok’s mind. _I’ll show you willing._

 He drew Sh’lok’s face close again and teased his Vulcan’s lips with his own until Sh’lok was moaning for more, opening for him, desperate. Then John slid in and once more found Sh’lok’s tongue and had his way with it, stroking, sucking… while doing his best to imagine, in exquisite clarity, what he planned to do to Sh’lok next. It took no more than a minute or two of this before Sh’lok was on his back again, legs spread, writhing, gasping, his cock’s head bobbing upward from the traces of wetness it had left on his belly.

John got up on his knees and leaned down to that head as if drawn by a magnet, the desire and heat fairly boiling up in him at Sh’lok’s dark spicy scent, stronger there than anywhere else on him and so heady. He strongly suspected that there was something else going on as well, and the mere suspicion immediately provided him via the mindmeld with evidence that he was right. From the distant depths to which matters of workaday science had temporarily been consigned, John caught a faint echo of data about the ways in which a Vulcan mate’s body chemistry began altering itself during _pon farr_ to suit and please the other. What it would make of a _human’s_ chemistry John had no idea; but then Sh’lok’s was part human too…

In any case, with every breath Sh’lok’s dark fragrance was curling into John like some exotic musky incense, making it harder and harder to concentrate on anything but sex. _Pheromonal,_ John thought, and had to laugh. _Like I need to be_ made _to want to be where I am!_ Slowly John lowered his face to the head of Sh’lok’s cock and kissed the tip of it, slowly, tenderly, feeding himself on the sound of Sh’lok’s moan… then brushed down over that head more intimately, with open lips.

The touch of velvety skin against his mouth, warm and delicate, was unquestionably accentuated by that sharp rich scent, stronger here and so desirable. John just smiled and gently stroked the foreskin halfway down over the long graceful head, opened his mouth, and guided Sh’lok in, closing his lips around him…

That was when the full pheromonal punch hit him with the taste of Sh’lok’s pre-ejaculate, both utterly indescribable and ridiculously good. Right behind it came Sh’lok’s extravagant shock of delight at the wet heat of John’s mouth on him. For a few moments John’s head spun with the combination of the emotional and sensory onslaughts, and was left with no response but _oh my God more—_

It had been a while since John had had either opportunity or inclination to exercise this particular area of his expertise, but his longing to drive Sh’lok’s pleasure to far greater heights was irresistible. _And yes, yes I’m feeling what he feels too but_ that’s not what it’s about—! The unspoken longings fulfilled at last, the shy joy Sh’lok was feeling at directly experiencing _John’s_ excitement and passion—they were worth more to John than any mere pheromonal high. And every minute more that John spent kissing and licking and stroking that handsome cock treated him to that much more of the sight of Sh’lok lying there trembling and gasping, helpless with the ecstasy of it.

It was ridiculous how arousing John found the sight of that normally intent, phaser-focused power lying there so _undone_. And the arousal was both shared and becoming unbearably arousing on the other side of the union too. _Let me,_ Sh’lok was murmuring, more urgent than John had ever heard him, _John, let me—!_

John had just enough warning through the meld to straighten up—reluctant as he was to let go of that delectable cock, _all right, maybe the pheromones are working_ a bit, _it’s not like that’s entirely a_ bad _thing—_ and then with a kind of shattered grace Sh’lok was up on his knees and pushing John down on his back, kissing John’s nipples (and John squirmed and gasped, being exquisitely sensitive there, and of _course_ Sh’lok knew…), stroking his chest, his flanks… then bowing himself over John’s hips. He spent some moments first gently rubbing his cheek against John’s cock, again with that sense of unbelieving delight… and then turned his head and started stroking it with that soft, soft hair.

John moaned out loud as Sh’lok’s curls brushed down the length of him, tickling the head of his cock, rubbing softly against his balls. _Oh Sh’lok. Please. Please—_

 _Yes. Whatever you want. Anything._ Because John’s pleasure was Sh’lok’s and Sh’lok’s was John’s, and each could feel what the other felt, each seeing in his own mind the other’s strongest imaginings,  whatever it was the other one wanted the most. Sh’lok bent to John’s cock and wrapped those long warm hands around it, then began circling the head of it with his tongue, nibbling at John’s foreskin, kissing it, teasing gently under its rim. The breath went out of John in a long moan at the pleasure of what Sh’lok was doing to him and the desperate hope of what he might do next.

And he felt Sh’lok _feel_ the wish in the moment that John imagined it, and instantly move to grant it. Those curls brushed teasingly against John’s cock again; up one side, down the other, and then against John’s balls once more, a soft warm silken pressure that made John moan again with helpless longing and clutch at the bedclothes with one hand. With the other he reached down to tangle his fingers into Sh’lok’s hair, rubbing its irresistible softness against him.

Sh’lok rubbed his head back against that hand, turned his face into it, kissed the palm; then licked it, a long drag of hot wet tongue, intensely erotic. John gasped at that, for his hands seemed more sensitive than usual.

 _Because they are,_ Sh’lok said inside him. _Because you’re feeling them as a Vulcan feels them._ A slightly predatory smile. _As you’ll feel other things as well._

Gently Sh’lok pressed John’s hand back down against the bed, palm-up, and stroked down between the fingers with his own in exactly the way John had stroked between Sh’lok’s fingers earlier. John’s back arched and he cried out softly as the long soft touch ran straight down some never-suspected nerve-channel to his groin and throbbed deliciously there. His cock jerked up, and a flush of pure raw arousal ran up and down John’s body and made the hair on every limb stand on end.

Sh’lok bowed his head over John’s cock again, stroked the foreskin back, and ever so slowly began lapping at its head and its shaft, kissing it again and again on the tip or the head or down its length, dragging his tongue in long broad strokes down the shaft’s length and up again… worshipping John’s cock with his mouth as if it was something unspeakably precious, something he’d never dared to hope he might be allowed to touch. In this deluge of tenderness and at-last-requited desire John utterly lost his words, could find nothing with which to express himself but gasps and moans of bliss. 

Sh’lok was groaning too, feeling John’s arousal as well as his own, and his thought kept saying _Oh John, oh John,_ his pleasure almost anguished in its intensity. Apparently whatever _pon farr_ did to a Vulcan’s body chemistry was also functioning to make John’s scent and taste as alluring as Sh’lok’s was to him. But like John, Sh’lok was far more ravished by the reality of what was happening, what he was being allowed to do with someone he wanted so much. _And I see so much of what you like, John, what you want. Let me give you this, let me give you more—_

John threw his head back, panting, clutching at the bedclothes and struggling not to buck his hips up, as Sh’lok’s mouth slid further and further down him and drew him into the depths of that long hot throat. John lay there writhing in speechless delight as Sh’lok tongued him and sucked him and swallowed him down, so deep, so slow and sweet. To be inside Sh’lok physically as well as inside his mind was _impossibly_ good. John had no idea how it was that he hadn’t come yet, for he could feel Sh’lok’s astonishment and joy at how he could feel John’s pleasure as if it was his own, at the way John could feel what Sh’lok was doing as if _he_ was doing it—

 _And I feel you. From inside. So hungry for me. Oh John!_ Moment by moment Sh’lok was losing himself more deeply in the consuming darkness the mindmeld had wrapped around them, where words were unnecessary, where sensation and emotion were all. _But this is the_ pon farr, _and while we’re in meld, it is for you as it is for me. There can be no culmination until both wish it, until both choose it. So take your pleasure of me. Take all of it you want._

John groaned again, both at the realisation that Sh’lok was right—he wasn’t in any significant discomfort despite being incredibly turned on—and at the prospect of what yet lay before them. And because Sh’lok was once more swallowing around him, surrounding him relentlessly with that perfect wet heat…

It went on that way until John couldn’t bear it any more; he just had to be kissing Sh’lok again. Sh’lok felt his urgency and let John slide out, licking his cock all over as he did, gasping with his desire. Moments later they were lying on their sides together, arms wrapped fiercely tight around each other, and John fastened his mouth on Sh’lok’s, plunging his tongue into him, ravenous for him. Yet again he fell deep into the fascination of tasting himself on Sh’lok’s mouth while also tasting Sh’lok tasting _him_ as their tongues met and stroked. Around and around it went, an endlessly deepening spiral of pleasure and hunger out of which John had no wish to find his way.

A long time they spent plumbing those depths together. Positions shifted, limbs tangled together, hands stroked, mouths found new places to tease or bite or lavish with exquisite pleasures… and every one of those was shared, two minds savouring whatever one of them did. Yet John’s tendency to always be looking ahead and anticipating the next thing couldn’t be shaken off even here. They were on their sides now, chests pressed together, their cocks brushing teasingly against each other while Sh’lok nuzzled and nipped at John’s neck, eyes closed in pleasure at the feeling of John’s skin against his: and John was in that pleasure with him too.

He hummed with it. “So good, Sh’lok. _So good_. Yet all this is just the appetiser, isn’t it? You want more. And so do I.”

  _Oh yes,_ Sh’lok murmured into John’s mind. _My—_ He gasped softly as John’s fingers began teasing one of his nipples, pinching the hard bud harder. _My John. Whatever you want of me, it’s yours for the asking._

 _Then I want this_ your _way, Sh’lok,_ John whispered into that warm darkness between them, where the thought echoed, coiled, stroked around them as if it was itself a live thing. _Your way. I want you to_ take _what you want the most. I want you to give me what you most want to give. That’s what I want more than anything._

Sh’lok pressed his cheek against John’s and arched against him, hands stroking up John’s back and down to his arse, cupping it and brushing gently between the cheeks as he pushed their hips together. John pushed happily back, letting himself be pulled under by Sh’lok’s delight at what they were doing together. Yet he’d noticed a hesitation in Sh’lok’s thought, and instantly suspected it might conceal something that could make what they were experiencing together even more intense.

John let the arousal of the moment flood over his surface thought while letting his awareness of the interpenetrating depths of their minds go deeper. Faintly he caught something to do with a word, a concept that Sh’lok was not letting himself think about because he didn’t dare. It was something Sh’lok wanted so much to hear, to be part of, that even now he was keeping it where it couldn’t be seen—buried as the great gem of his heart had been buried in his mind palace’s caverns of treasure, hidden away in the shadows. 

But not from John. A working knowledge of the operations of people’s hearts was part of a starship captain’s business, and this man’s heart he knew better than most others’. The secret’s presence down in that darkness was as clear to him as his earlier sense of where the gem had been.

 _Softly, though. Softly._ He needed to distract Sh’lok a little first before he looked into this any further. _And fortunately right at the moment that’s easy…_

John smiled against Sh’lok’s neck. _I felt what you were doing there_ , he said, doing his best to draw a feeling of slight wickedness about the concept.

Immediate interest. _What?_

 _There._ Sense memory, so very sharp, of Sh’lok’s hands on John’s arse, on the fingers brushing inward…

 _Did you indeed,_ Sh’lok murmured. _Did you like it?_

_Oh yes._

_Good._ The word was a soft rumble of anticipation and promise.

John shivered with pleasure at it, but moved on. _Especially because there are_ other _things one might do there and like._

_Oh?_

More sense memory. Something John had had done to him, once upon a time, and had liked _so_ very much. _Wet wet tongue warm stroking opening kissing circling warm soft tongue wet squirming moaning kissing deep softly pushing thrusting in in in—_  

Sh’lok’s reaction wasn’t one of shock in any negative sense… but paired complete astonishment _(hmm,_ John thought, _cultural blind spot there? Interesting)_ and abruptly heightened arousal, followed by an instantaneous bout of most intense visual and sensory imagination involving him doing that to John. Or John doing that to him. Or _both._ The moment Sh’lok started getting lost in that imagery, John swiftly turned his attention back to that shadowy avoidance-shrouded place in Sh’lok’s ground of being. 

Those shadows sparkled faintly with the piled treasure of the mind palace’s deep-delved halls as John moved quickly through the space. _This is seriously important. Come on, it’s here, I know it…_

He could hear his pulse racing. But someone else’s, too: much faster than a human’s. _His heart._ John turned in the dimness, located the source of the sound. It was very close to him, wrapped in shadow. 

He dropped to his knees, put his hands down into the darkness where he knelt, and felt around. Under the surface was a warmth, like a bruise, and beneath it, the fierce drumbeat of that pulse. The surface melted away under his hands, as if something lay there that wanted to be found. John slipped his hands in and under, touched it, lifted it up—

A word whispered itself to him, a Vulcan word: just a short one. At the sound of it, John trembled… and it wasn’t his tremor, his longing, but Sh’lok’s. What he was holding, beating like a heart, was as full of meaning as a living heart would have been with blood; and the meanings flowed and shifted through the word, beat by beat, as a whole body’s blood might have. The word meant _best_ _friend_ and _partner_ and _comrade_ and _fellow-warrior_ and _bare is back without brother behind it;_ it was _lover_ and _beloved_ and _confidant_ and _soulmate_ and so many other things, reaching deep, spreading wide. Just touching the thoughts that Sh’lok’s silent wistful hopes had wrapped about the word in the past, both distant and recent, made something in John echo like a struck gong… the sound and feeling of the longing resonances filling him full right out to the surface of his skin. He felt in himself Sh’lok’s certainty that once you were _that_ to someone, once they knew what that word meant and called you by it, that you would never, _never_ be empty again.

It was not the kind of word you could simply put back where you found it. John stood up in the dimness, feeling it beating in his hands, and cupped them together to shelter it. He had the sudden sense of standing on a precipice, on the knife-edge of choice. That sense sent the adrenaline running up and down his spine, prickling his skin, speeding his pulse. _It’s true what Lestrade says, dammit. I have a danger boner. The worst one ever._

But there was no mistaking how the word was calling to him _: be this! Because you can._ Be this _to the one who wants it more than anything. Because you want it too! You’ve_ always _wanted it with someone. Now it’s come to you at last. Take the dare. This is your chance!_

John’s pulse thundered in his ears as he became aware of the magnitude of the opportunity that lay before him, open only to him of all humanity. Not so much a new path as a new, never-imagined way to walk it—in company, body and soul, forever.

Nonetheless caution, also part of a good Captain’s stock in trade, spoke urgently to him too. _W_ as he going to just _do_ this? Just take this dangerous step into an unchartable relationship and an unknown future that could do no-telling- _what_ to his career?

John shivered, waiting for the answer.

And the calm, the choice, settled over him. _Oh, God,_ yes.

Because “Your way,” he’d said. John knew now how deep and far that way would go. Here was the evidence, incontravertible, in his hands.

 _Your way let it be, then,_ John thought.

The moments were fleeting by, though, and he could feel Sh’lok coming out of his momentary deep immersion in imagination… so John tucked the word away safe inside him and slid innocently out of the shadows, to where there were still bodies lying on their sides, pressed together, rubbing against one another.

 _Seems like something you’d like to do, then?_ John said.

 _Oh, John._ Ye _s. It’s not… I mean, it seems to be…_

_Something your people missed along the way?_

_So it would seem._

_Well, we should give it a try, then_ , John said. _In the service of a thorough intracultural investigation._

 _Indeed yes,_ Sh’lok said, utterly serious. _For science._

John burst out laughing, and was glad to see Sh’lok’s eyes crinkling at him, confirmation that he understood John and could find it funny too.

_I know something else you’d like to do, though. Or say. Or both._

_Indeed?_

John nodded against Sh’lok and drew back to look into those eloquent eyes: fixed on him, waiting, ready for anything… so long as it was John proposing it.

 _Let’s not just_ play _at_ pon farr, _yeah?_ he said. _Let’s have this be real._

The eyes widened. All the shadows wrapped around them in the meld stirred with amazement and alarm and oh, such unspeakable _longing—_ unconcealable, unmasterable. _John—_

 _I can feed you the first line,_ John said, reaching up to touch Sh’lok’s face. _And if my accent sucks, well, you’ll correct me._

Before he could change his mind, he took a long breath. _“Akt koon ut tak mek fahr,”_ John said. _“Tak fee’h ut fahr tek kal.”_ _Thou cam’st to the Place and fought. And by thee I am won._  

Sh’lok gazed at him in utter shock.

“It _does_ suck, doesn’t it,” John said, resigned. “I probably just ordered a chicken sandwich and coffee or something.” He paused, sighed. “No, it wouldn’t be chicken, would it. Avocado club…?”

“John,” Sh’lok whispered, and took John’s face in his hands: hands that trembled. “Are you—are you sure, do you know—”

_I do._

Sh’lok swallowed.

 _And it’s true,_ John said. _You fought, Sh’lok_. _Not in any way you wanted to. But you came through it alive… and so did I…_ and y _ou’ve won me. Maybe not in any way that it_ usually _happens._ He shrugged. _But when have we two ever done anything the_ usual _way?_

Sh’lok was gazing at him with the most peculiar expression. Around them the shadowy joint consciousness of the meld had gone very quiet, very still.

 _Oh God, even when I’m in your_ head _I get things wrong, incredibly wrong, please Sh’lok, how can I—_    “It’s not,” John said hastily, “I mean, if this isn’t—”

Sh’lok’s thumbs stroked John’s cheekbones. _“Ut tek akt koon mek fahr,”_ he whispered. _For thee I have fought._ Which was more than true enough, on many other battlefields, other places of challenge where the bond between them had been affirmed again and again.

And then John heard him go on to murmur the rest of the very old words, the words of the normal completion of the ceremonial.

_For thy sake have I conquered. By that conquest, thou art mine._

The words sank into the core of him, into John’s bones, and he breathed out in unspeakable relief as he gazed into those amazing eyes. But it was his turn again now.

Earlier, in the depths of Sh’lok’s mind, he’d heard the words that came next. Now he put his face against Sh’lok’s, and his lips against Sh’lok’s ear, and whispered: _Then, warrior, take possession of thy prize._

And to John’s astonishment and delight, Sh’lok actually _growled._

A moment later he had flipped John over on his back and seized John’s face, his fingers gripping into the nerve-pressure points on both sides. The meld instantly tightened down into something far more intense and focused than it had been for a while, a conflagration of sensation, of sheer heat and raw ravenous want. There was nothing gentle or tentative about Sh’lok’s contact with John’s mind this time. It was keyed toward showing that it could overpower the one resisting it if it had to, if it _wanted_ to—

John bared his teeth in a slightly feral grin, pulled Sh’lok down against him, sank his teeth in his shoulder, and against the background of Sh’lok’s surprise, rolled _him_ over and pinned him.

It didn’t last more than a second or so, of course, and there then ensued a bout of mental and physical rough-housing that John found himself enjoying tremendously despite knowing that there was no chance in Hell he could win it. Months of sparring with Sh’lok in the gym had taught him that the Vulcan’s strength far surpassed his own. All this meant from John’s point of view was that he had to be quicker than his opponent, smart about exploiting momentary opportunities for leverage, and always prepared to do something unexpected that Sh’lok wouldn’t have had time to anticipate. He concentrated on this, while also resisting by sheer stubbornness Sh’lok’s attempts to use the mindmeld to interfere with John’s nervous system or his muscular control. _You fought for me? Fine. One more fight, and then—_

 Fortunately Vulcan tradition supported the understanding that the winner of a Challenge shouldn’t automatically assume that his prize would cooperate without a little personal testing first. The two of them rolled and wrestled and grappled and found holds and were shaken or levered out of them, and John got in a little growling as well, for Sh’lok’s fiery combative tone of mind was contagious. If John’s concentration on their tussle slipped more than once, so that he kept winding up on his back, maybe that was because he was a lot more concerned than Sh’lok seemed to be about falling off the bed onto the floor.

Or maybe it was something else. More than once, when Sh’lok was panting with arousal and the effort of holding John down, the knowledge that he’d found in Sh’lok’s mind about who _really_ controlled the culmination of one of these encounters resurfaced. More than once John wanted to simply relax into that powerful grip, surrender, let his knees spread open, and take the consummation that was being offered him. For someone in his position, that was a very Vulcan response, John knew. He was pleased by that, and pleased that he had to fight it a bit.

 _…But not just yet. Make him prove himself just a little bit more!_ John thought. And _that_ was very Vulcan too. 

So they strove together a while more, getting slippery with sweat and other liquids—for both of them were harder than ever, and leaking—and the air grew hot and full of the rich or sharp musks of Vulcan or human arousal. And at last came the moment that John knew was right, without knowing how.

He was on his back again with his feet braced on the mattress for leverage and his knees bent. Sh’lok was kneeling between them, his fingers interlaced with John’s as he tried to get control of John’s arms by pushing them straight down so as to pinion his elbows against his sides. Until this moment, John had been resisting him by pushing straight up. But now, slowly, he started to angle his arms out to either side. He would not unlace their fingers. He gripped Sh’lok’s tight in his own, and forced him to spread his arms as John spread his own; pulled him down and pulled him close, until he was forcing Sh’lok to pin John’s hands, more or less spreadeagled, to the bed.

Then slowly John let his knees drop open. Slowly he let his fingers relax. Slowly he arched his back against the bed, and gazed up into Sh’lok’s eyes, and found the old, old words he needed.

 _Your prize is won_ , he said, _and given into your hand. Enter, warrior; claim what you have earned._   

Sh’lok’s eyes widened again, and he took a long gasp of breath. He didn’t let go: but he held still.

 _John._ Those arousal-darkened eyes gazed into his from very close, and the expression was a touch uncertain. _I know what it can mean in some human cultures_ … _to be pierced. To be entered…_

  _Taken,_ John said. _Owned._ He slid one hand out from under Sh’lok’s and ran it slowly over his chest, down his belly, and stroked his cock, his eyes fixed on Sh’lok’s. _But in yours… the meanings go a different way entirely, don’t they._

Sh’lok’s mind went up in a tumult of astonishment, of sheer amazement on being offered something that he had secretly profoundly longed for, but long dismissed as impossible. Yet he still needed to be sure that John fully appreciated the ramifications _—_

John shook his head. _Sh’lok. I understand._ Feel _it. I said, ‘Yours.’ I mean it. Make me yours._

With their minds so close, there was no missing the drumbeat of background thought: _must be sure,_ must be sure, _I will not deceive him by omission_ — Sh’lok drew a long shuddering breath, full of hope. _If I do that,_ he said, _then by so doing I also make myself yours…_

 _But you_ are _mine,_ John said. It was as much sudden realisation as assertion—but here in the depths of the meld, where untruth was impossible, it simply seemed obvious. _Because I chose you, didn’t I. All the way back on Earth._

Then out of nowhere John had his own moment of uncertainty. What if the bald assertion was giving Sh’lok second thoughts? John swallowed. He had to be sure. _If you’re all right with that—_

 _John._ Sh’lok’s free hand slipped down to rest on John’s chest, over his heart. What John saw in those eyes, laid bare for him without question, was much more than any mere loyalty, precious though that might be. _I am far_ more _than all right with that._

 He took a breath as long as Sh’lok’s had been, hearing the echoes of that short word. _Good. Because nothing’s happened to change my mind. You are_ mine.

And Sh’lok heard the fierceness and the certainty, and he pressed himself down against John, enfolded him in his arms, and clasped John tightly to him as he buried his face against his neck. _Yes._

_Then claim your prize. And I will too.  
_

* * *

Further explanations were unnecessary. _Expertise? Here. Use mine._ John knew what to do, so Sh’lok knew what to do.

The necessary lubricant was under John’s pillow, because he’d been needing to have it to hand a lot more than usual lately. John lay back for a long sweet while with one of his Vulcan’s arms wrapped around him, hand cupping his head and gently massaging his neck, while the long clever fingers of Sh’lok’s other hand slowly broached him. First just one sliding in and out, in and out, again and again; then the second, deeply stroking, methodically scissoring in company with the first… incessant, inexorable, indescribably good. John writhed and moaned and pushed himself against the slow and exquisite opening, feeling Sh’lok feeling his fingers stroking inside John’s heat and tightness as it relaxed and softened, gripping Sh’lok’s fingers with himself again and again as arousal made him spasm against them, realising how incredibly turned on Sh’lok was getting at the thought of what was to come— 

John gasped, for the realisation instantly plunged him into the depths of Sh’lok’s hunger for him, and the sheer intensity of it made it feel to John as if Sh’lok was on fire inside. _My eyes are flame,_ that low rough voice came back to him in memory, _my heart is flame—_ Now he was able to hear the arousal in Sh’lok’s voice then, just barely managed. That ravenous desire ran down his veins, combined with his own and brought John out in a sweat of sheer lust, throbbed in his cock and Sh’lok’s both, pulses speeding, balls tightening—

John gulped for air, stroked the arm that held him. _Oh God. Sh’lok. Make sure I don’t— Not yet— I don’t want to—_

 _You won’t._ As if to prove the statement, Sh’lok’s two fingers together brushed softly over John’s prostate and a bolt of unimaginable pleasure shot up through him, pushing the breath right out of his lungs. But when he’d managed to gasp in another breath and blink some vision back into his eyes, John realised he hadn’t come, though his balls were tight and achingly full against him, though his cock was absolutely as hard as it had even been in his life. 

_Wow…_

With clearly perceptible satisfaction, Sh’lok went back to stroking less physiologically loaded areas. _Any Vulcan learns a certain amount of control over his nervous system. And since at the moment you have some Vulcan in you…_ John couldn’t help but giggle, and Sh’lok smiled. _That control is available for use._

John gasped again as Sh’lok ever so slowly slid in another finger. _I want a whole lot more Vulcan in me than that,_ John said, and laughed. _As soon as possible. Oh God please hurry._

_Not long now. Another, I think…?_

_Yes._ He knew Sh’lok didn’t really need to ask: he could feel what John felt, that what little discomfort he experienced during this process kept passing surprisingly quickly. _Possibly more of that neural control…?_

_Yes. It has many uses._

_In which I expect you to see that I’m fully checked out at the earliest opportunity._

_Believe me, my John,_ Sh’lok murmured, _you will find me a most…_ diligent _… instructor._ The arm that held him drew his face close and Sh’lok’s lips sought his.

John abandoned himself to the pleasure of Sh’lok’s tongue in him, Sh’lok’s fingers in him, probing, sounding his depths, laying his body open as his mind already was. Blending with it was the constant awareness of Sh’lok’s anticipation, his delight, and his hardness, the drumming throb within it slowly and inexorably increasing in pace. Soon John’s whole consciousness seemed to be consumed by that rhythm, his desperately hard cock’s own throbbing, and by the movement of his own body as it thrust against Sh’lok of its own volition.

 _Now,_ he thought. _Now. Ready. Oh, Sh’lok,_ now.

 _John._ Another kiss, so deep _. Yes._

Gently Sh’lok lowered John to the bed. _At last at last at last,_ the drumbeat said in Sh’lok’s mind, and John was in complete agreement as he settled himself on his back once more, let his knees fall open, reached up to touch Sh’lok as his Vulcan knelt between his legs and pulled him partway up onto the slope of his thighs. John found the lube, filled a hand with it, warmed it, reached out for the weight and heat of Sh’lok’s penis and stroked it wet and slick until Sh’lok cried out uncontrollably with the pleasure of it.

 _Now,_ John said.

The next moment he moaned with anticipation as he felt the first blunt kiss of Sh’lok’s cock against his entrance. John kept his eyes fixed on Sh’lok’s and bore down against that sweet touch. As he did, John felt the slick broad head press in, and in, and _in,_ starting to open him up inside, so warm and hard—

Filling him, more and more deeply. _Filling me so full. Oh God._ But because of the mindmeld he was also the one pressing _into_ John, the one who _was_ filling him, the one who felt John sliding and sheathing tight and hot and strong around him, powerful, irresistible. When John cried out in pleasure and clenched on him as Sh’lok slid deeper, and then deeper still, John could also feel what Sh’lok was feeling—the conquering heat surrounding him, encompassing him, making him John’s to do with as John pleased. Sh’lok was gasping with the ultimate delight of being incorporated, enclosed, _mastered_ by the one whose mastery he longed for in this moment more than anything. 

John let his head drop back on the pillow and groaned with the intensity of feeling Sh’lok finish slowly pressing his whole hard length into him, yielding all of himself into John’s body’s grasp, into his power. It was the utter surrender of one who trusted his partner completely, life and breath, body and soul. John felt Sh’lok pausing to savour the moment, the giving, the having-given, with a thrill of utter joy. _I never thought this would happen. Never thought I would feel this…_

 _Feel it again, Sh’lok,_ John said, panting, rocking himself against Sh’lok’s body the better to feel who was inside him, from both sides. _Fill me again. Fill me deep. Want you again. Got to have you._

Sh’lok gasped along with John and slowly drew himself out, unhurried, feeling the stroke all along him, hot, slick, tight, strong, as John clenched down around him again, letting him know he understood what Sh’lok wanted, what he felt. And then—

 _Again!_ John said. And slow and slick and fierce and hungry Sh’lok pushed himself into John again, savoring the feeling of himself being welcomed in, held, included, made part of John Watson. John licked his lips and gasped again at the feeling of his Vulcan seating himself as deeply inside as he could possibly go.

“Mine,” John whispered. He wrapped his legs around Sh’lok’s waist and pulled him in closer still, and Sh’lok cried out in near-anguished delight. _More. Sh’lok,_ more. _Fill me up with you. Your way._ Your way.

_Oh, my John, yes. Yes!_

And Sh’lok filled him, and filled him again, more and more quickly now, exulting in being physically in John, at being _permitted_ to be there, at having won the right to give himself over. With every single stroke John could feel how very much Sh’lok had wanted this—to _belong_ to John—and more deeply by far than he already did as a friend, as a colleague, as a fellow officer. With every inward thrust Sh’lok could feel himself becoming more John’s, more John’s _own…_ as he’d so very much desired. With every stroke John could feel the ecstasy rising higher in Sh’lok, that all this was _true,_ that against all odds it was _real,_ that he could be John’s, that John could be—could be— 

 _Yours,_ John thought, as Sh’lok drove so deeply into him, again and again. And John lost himself again and again in the feeling of his body welcoming Sh’lok in, as if he’d always belonged there; as if his presence there was a completion John had never even suspected possible. When he’d first come aboard _Enterprise,_ John had thought he’d achieved the “best case” for his life—one that though satisfying enough was still always going to be solitary, even in a crowd of four hundred and thirty. But that solitude had been most conclusively shattered by the most brilliant, infuriating, fascinating, _amazing_ being imaginable, and John knew now that he didn’t ever again want to go anywhere that did not involve having this man at his side—or John being at _his_ side. He also knew that his true best case was within him right this moment, making himself John’s… and more than anything, he wanted to feel _that_ process come to its logical conclusion.

 _Sh’lok…_ John reached up to him with both hands, stroked his sides, gripped his arms.

Sh’lok’s eyes were fixed on him as he thrust and thrust again. _John. I can feel…_

 _Yes._ John could feel the beginnings of his orgasm starting to build in him, pooling low. _You?_ But just asking gave him the answer. He could feel Sh’lok’s climax beginning to coil tight in him, a molten weight of pressure and heat… yet the urge toward release was holding at that level, under restraint.

 _I want to feel that, Sh’lok. You in me._ All _of you in me. I’m ready._

_John. Yes._

_Then let’s—_ Let’s!

Sh’lok bowed his head. Immediately John felt the urgency within him intensify as if it had been let off a leash, starting to peak higher still as he surrendered himself to the feeling of the relentless strength driving Sh’lok’s hardness into him, faster and faster now, Sh’lok’s readiness swiftly scaling up in pace with John’s.

_Closer now. Oh God._

_Yes. So close._

John pulled Sh’lok down nearer to him, feeling Sh’lok’s breathing harsh and eager against his face.  _Won’t last long—_ For now not just his own climax was rising to overwhelm him, but Sh’lok’s as well _._

 _Have no wish to,_ Sh’lok said. _All I want is this—this moment to keep, for always. To be lost in it—in you. Always. To be—_

 _J_ ohn could hear it, hear what he wanted to say, but what would make him far happier if John said i _t. Mine, Sh’lok,_ John said, reaching up to Sh’lok’s face _. Mine._

A long gasp of desire about to be fulfilled. _So I have been, John. And always shall be. Yours—_

The tide of sweet fire was swiftly rising in him and John knew he couldn’t hold it off for more than a few seconds longer. His body was desperate for his release and for Sh’lok’s, surging toward the rapture that would drown them both. But there was one more word that had to be spoken.

As John’s hands touched Sh’lok’s face his fingers found the pressure points, locating them as perfectly as Sh’lok could have… no surprise, with their union as deep and near-complete as it was. Now John sank in, sank all the way down into the hot throbbing darkness that seemed to be filling Sh’lok right out to his skin, and reached out and gathered it all to and into him as if enfolding it in his arms.

They were almost completely one now, swiftly and hungrily flowing together in that darkness as the twinned heats within them grew and fed each other, ready to flare into conflagration. In that last moment when there was still a tiny fraction of separation between them, John opened his eyes, looked into Sh’lok’s, and spoke as he spoke to his ship, his voice reaching everywhere inside the one who was inside him.

 _Sh’lok,_ he said. _T’hy’la._ Now.

With a cry of desperate ecstasy that echoed everywhere inside Sh’lok that the command had, John was obeyed. The torrent of utter joyous fulfillment that came crashing down over him with the quick hot liquid bursts of Sh’lok’s release inside him instantly plunged John into his own orgasm, into a world as whited out in pulse after pulse of overwhelming blinding bliss as if someone had ignited a nova at his core. It took a long while for John to find breath again, to realise that he _could_ breathe again, and to find enough strength in his limbs to pull close the long lean body that clutched at his, shuddering, throbbing with a last few pulses from deep inside him. Sh’lok’s mind was awash in a soul-deep sense of utter completion the likes of which John had never imagined… and as it flowed over him too, irresistible, John willingly let go and let it pull him under.

* * *

How long they lay together, holding each other, shaking with aftershocks, gasping, faces pressed together, John had no idea. After they came the mindmeld gradually came undone, but John was finding it hard to feel as bereft at that as might have seemed logical under other circumstances. To him there now seemed to be some connection between him and Sh’lok that was still extant, an unseen thread stretching between them, unbroken. In fact it occurred to John, as he finally realised his pulse had finished slowing back to something like normal, that that thread might have been there for some time. He’d just been too unobservant to notice it.

John opened his mouth to say something to Sh’lok and then started chuckling helplessly at himself, because any number of things he might normally have said in such circumstances were here and now rendered completely banal. _Was it good for you_? He knew damn well it was, and _how_ good it was. Fucking spectacular, in fact. _Are you all right_? He knew Sh’lok was far more than all right; indeed, overjoyed, ecstatic, simply and straightforwardly _happy_ in ways that had to be giving someone who so routinely professed himself a stranger to emotion a headache of monumental proportions. _Think we might go again in a while?_ John just started laughing weakly at the very thought, then coughed; God, was he dry. _Can I get you some water?_

“Thank you,” Sh’lok said in a muffled panther-purr rumble from where he lay face down on John’s shoulder. “Most kind.”

John squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, took a deep breath, and started laughing again for entirely different reasons. He put a hand up to the dark curls and ran his fingers softly through them, caressing. _You are absolutely amazing,_ he thought. _And mine._

“Mmmmmm,” Sh’lok said, the purr even deeper if possible, and turned his head enough toward John to rub those curls against him.

It occurred to John that perhaps Going Again In A While wasn’t as impossible as he’d thought. “Water,” he said, and wriggled himself enough sideways to find a way out from under Sh’lok and out of the bed.

He staggered into the bath suite—called so only by courtesy, since even a starship captain got nothing better than a dual water/sonic shower in his quarters—and first relieved himself, then wet a warm flannel to get the worst of his and Sh’lok’s emissions off himself while running cold water to fill a carafe. His hasty ablutions finished, the flannel rinsed and wetted again, John brought it in along with the carafe and its filled glass, handing the latter to Sh’lok, who had braced himself up on one elbow.

“Oh my God,”  John murmured as he stood there looking up and down the bed. It was simply a wreck, the pillow and outer bedclothes liberally smeared and spattered with the DNA of two species in various modalities. “ _Look_ at this. My yeoman’s going to—” He was about to say “pitch a fit” when he realised that the situation was a bit more dire than that. “Take one look and know _exactly_ what happened here. If I strip the bed it’ll just make it that much more certain! And about ten minutes later everyone else on the ship will—”

Sh’lok put the empty glass down on the shelf above the head of the bed and began to laugh softly.

John looked at him in surprise. “What?”

“John,” Sh’lok said, and favored him with a mischievous look of the sort that John was now realising he’d seen surprisingly often over their time together. “I would suggest that the odds are ninety-six point five percent or greater that more than half the crew know already.”

John’s mouth fell open. _“More_ than half—”

Sh’lok availed himself of the flannel. “The active shift,” Sh’lok said, “probably began sharing their suspicions about the time you headed for Engineering. Those suspicions will most likely have solidified to near-certainty when you were seen making for the shuttle bay. Only your desire to be circumspect about locating me would have prevented this cascade of events from beginning during the shift previous… though I suspect we may begin to hear anecdotal evidence of credits changing hands around the time you spoke to the Bridge crew on my departure for Sickbay—”

“You know about that.”

Sh’lok shrugged, folding the flannel neatly and dropping it over the side of the bed. “Meretricious,” he said. “Bridge surveillance video is always available shipwide to the First Officer. Naturally it’s merely good practice to review it at intervals to make sure one’s own data is complete…”

John had to start laughing then. Resigned, he got back onto the bed and stretched himself out face to face with Sh’lok again. “Right. And of course the people who were sure they were onto a winner started calling other crew who were off shift to inform them. Or gloat…”

“Quite.”

“Thus accounting for the guess of ‘more than half’.”

“John,” Sh’lok said, drawing himself up in as much indignation as one could reasonably express while lying on one’s side, naked. “I never guess.”

“Oh, oh, _so_ sorry,” John said, eyes wide with very fake shock. “I should have said ‘estimation.’”

“Better.”

All John could do was start giggling. “Oh God,” he gasped (when he could spare the breath), and hid his face in the pillow.

When he came up for air Sh’lok was lying there leaning on folded arms and gazing over them at him with an expression that was both affectionate and somewhat mystified. “John,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time—and please bear in mind that of course you needn’t answer if it’s something culturally sensitive—”

John giggled harder. “As if there’s _any_ question,” he said between bursts of it, “that you could ask me—that I wouldn’t answer. _What?”_

“This extremely frequent invocation of Deity. Not so much in moments of emotional stress, admittedly I’ve seen that from you often enough before, but while in pursuit of, ah, sexual objectives—”

“Oh sweet Christ—”

 _“Exactly_ what I meant, thank you John, but if you could possibly explain _why_ you—”

“Oh jeez.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not religious, seriously, it’s just a… a thing, something a lot of humans from my part of the world do when something’s just so intense, or amazing, or… fantastic…”

Then John laughed. “You know, you’re right. I _do_ do it out loud all the time.”

Sh’lok’s face suddenly went unexpectedly gentle. He reached out a hand to John and stroked his hair. “My John,” he said, almost whispering. “Thank you for doing it out loud. For letting me know that it was all right to find someone amazing… fantastic. Remarkable. And for demonstrating that… by making me yours.”

John turned his head to press his lips against the hand that touched him, and looked up into Sh’lok’s eyes, smiling into them and shaking his head slightly. “I’m the luckiest man alive,” he said.

“At the risk of appearing insubordinate,” Sh’lok said, “I feel I must claim that position for my own.”

“Well, fine. Just so long as I don’t find out all of a sudden that I’m going to have to fight you for it.”

Sh’lok laughed—that sound that John thought he’d never get enough of. “No, John. I think we’ve had enough of that for one day… wouldn’t you say?”

“More than,” John said, reaching out to draw Sh’lok’s face to his. Their lips met, and for some moments there was no conversation except the kind that takes place between willing mouths in silence.

When they paused for breath, John stroked Sh’lok’s cheek and glanced around. “Look,” he said, “how about a shower?” He turned his attention to the bed and sighed. “At least we only got the _spread_ completely filthy. And I’ve got a spare blanket. Let’s pull this off, and the pillowslip, and shove everything we don’t want to look at in there. And then, when we’re comfy…”

That invisible gossamer thread between them thrummed softly as Sh’lok smiled a small shy smile at John. “Yes,” he said.

John forgot all about the tidying for the moment and followed Sh’lok into the bath suite.

* * *

 What followed after the shower, after what _happened_ in the shower (it began with shampoo but it didn’t end there), after they were clean and dry, after the bed was somewhat restructured, after they were lying in it together again… was a leisurely business, unhurried, and intimate in a way John had never imagined possible.

One way or another they never really stopped touching each other. Sometimes it was simply for the pleasure of being able to do it without the proprieties and strictures of the Service in the way. Sometimes the attraction between them simmered up into arousal again, but with the edge of urgency relieved for the moment, they could simply relax into the gentle heat of it, with or without the mindmeld. And while the meld admittedly had its attractions—the incredibly swift interlace of thought with thought, of shared imagery and sensation—there was also a pleasure in the pace and sound of the spoken word that both of them enjoyed, in having to take one’s time to guess or understand the other’s thought and motive. After all, they had been functioning that way quite effectively for a long time now. And even the mere spoken word gained all kinds of nuance when whispered or breathed softly right into another’s ear, while elsewhere hands touched or stroked and spoke their own language.  

The two of them moved through numerous configurations to see what was most comfortable, and wound up at last with John propped up against the headboard-shelf and Sh’lok lying in his arms, head pillowed against John’s reconstructed shoulder and occasionally stroking his face against it. This left John free to stroke those dark soft curls whenever he liked (and wonder idly whether he was developing a kink) or tilt that beautiful face up to his to steal—all right, request—the occasional kiss (that mouth, he could _not_ get enough of that mouth). It also left Sh’lok in a position to carry on a conversation (and check to see whether John was paying enough attention) while simultaneously thoroughly examining and analysing John’s privates for differences and similarities to his own. At least that was his _excuse_. But John noticed that said examination kept losing itself in long bouts of Sh’lok gently and reflectively stroking John’s cock or cupping and petting his balls, which tended to impair John’s ability to carry on a conversation or indeed concentrate on anything else whatsoever.

At least for the moment he was succeeding, as Sh’lok seemed to have turned his attention to John’s chest hair. For John’s part, it was rare enough for him to have time or opportunity to lie awake in this bed without thoughts of duty intruding. They were doing that now. “We have some things to think about,” he said.

Sh’lok looked up at him from under those long lashes. “When do we _not_ have things to think about? Starship command is a poor career choice for those who desire a life of mindless leisure.”

“You know what I mean, Sh’lok. Us. And the crew…”

Sh’lok rolled his eyes in the manner of a man dismissing a trifle. “If you seek my advice, John, I believe we should go on as we have been doing. It’s not as if our commitment to one another would seem likely to provoke either of us into violating our oaths to first protect the crew and the ship. _That_ issue has already been tested and proven many times… the result being our continued survival and repeated commendations from Starfleet. Also, consider—it’s not a given sexual relationship that’s supposed to possibly endanger one’s performance. It’s the emotional relationship that’s routinely assumed to accompany the sexual component. And in our case, the emotional relationship has been there to a greater or lesser extent, at least _in potentia,_ since first we both joined this ship. Has it not?”

There didn’t seem much point in denying it. John heaved a sigh. “Logic…” he said. “Can’t fight that, I suppose.”

 “Additionally, I would submit to you that the crew recognised from a very early stage what we’ve been at such pains to conceal from ourselves.”

John smiled wryly. “You did mention irony…”

Sh’lok produced a sort of eyebrow-shrug of agreement. “Nor, I think, need we ever fear what may come of that. Your crew knows your total loyalty to them, and how intent you are on protecting them at all costs. Nor would you fail to sacrifice yourself, or me, or both of us, to save them should there be need. And in that attitude I heartily concur. So if you and I merely continue to comport ourselves appropriately as officers in public—in such a way as to assure your command that we are going about business as usual—then all should be well.”

It was hard to find anything in this thesis that sounded like less than good sense.  Still, John sighed. “Going to have to try to avoid pulling the uniform off you on the Bridge, then. Or just grabbing hold of you in the corridor to snog you helpless on a whim.”

“‘Helpless,’” Sh’lok said, and sniffed. “We shall see about that.”

“Let’s,” John said, and tilted Sh’lok’s face up to his.

_(forty-six minutes later)_

_Oh John. John. My John, my own..._ John!!

_Mmmm?_

_…How do you_ do _that!_ With just your mouth!

A smile. _By paying attention._

_…Would you pay me some more?_

_(sixty-five minutes later_ )

“…How long now to Altair VI?”

“Thirty-two hours, forty-two minutes, eighteen seconds.”

“Well then,” John said. “Nothing terrible’s happened, so I suppose we can safely leave the crew running things by themselves that long.”

“John. You don’t mean to tell me you actually _planned_ to do otherwise.”

“Mmm, well, it wasn’t so much a plan as a general strategy. Though I did think we might take a break at about the halfway point and let ourselves be seen. Get a bite to eat. And do the rounds a bit so they don’t, you know, panic.”

 _“This_ crew?” Sh’lok laughed out loud _._ “They’ve been under your command for months, John. Panic is not their mode. They’ll be coping, as you well know. And probably laying more bets.”

“On when we _will_ come out, I suppose. And in what condition.”

Sh’lok put up an eyebrow in agreement. “I judge that theory to have considerable likelihood of being accurate.”

John snickered. “How about this?”  he said. “I think we should go down to the mess and have a meal… and then afterward start playing chess as if _nothing whatsoever_ had happened. And while we play, we’ll sit there discussing, I don’t know, duty rosters or something.”

“That sounds incredibly boring.”

“Exactly the point. It’ll drive ‘em crazy.”

Sh’lok looked at him in a kind of dry wonder. “Truly you _do_ have a wicked streak,” he said. “I officially take note.”

“It’ll also give them something to laugh about,” John said, “when they realise that even with everything else that’s going on, I’ll still take the opportunity to wind them up.”

Sh’lok’s look softened. “Because you care about them,” he said. “And don’t mind them seeing that such caring can take other forms than merely repeatedly saving their lives.”

John smiled. “A little variety never hurts,” he said.

“Mmm. Speaking of variety…”

“Yes?”

“Do you think we could perhaps take… another shower?”

  _(eighty-one minutes later)_

“Sh’lok…”

“Mmm?”

“Have you been monkeying with my refractory period?”

 _“I?_ Certainly not.”

“Then how the _fuck_ did we just—”

“This is _pon far_ r, John. By our actions of recent hours it would seem we’ve succeeded in significantly reconfiguring the process in your favour. And while the hormonal effects last, as it is for me, so it is for you.”

“Um.”

“Because normal _pon farr_ need not resolve itself after a single encounter. Ancient Vulcan reproductive imperatives configured the physiological response so as to allow for multiple attempts in a short period, thereby maximising the odds of fertilisation of the receptive partner—”

“Oh God, Sh’lok, _too much information…”_

Great surprise. “John. There is _no such thing_ as too much information!”

“Oh my. Sorry. Guess I can see your point.”

“I should hope so.”

“Guess I should be grateful, actually. Haven’t really felt the need to have a nap, for one thing. Which is kind of amazing.”

A long pause. “You are… _enjoying_ this, aren’t you?”

“Sh’lok—” And a hand is taken, and kissed, and placed carefully on a starship captain’s face.

A moment’s silence. _Ohh…_

_This is a lot to take in for both of us, isn’t it. A long time we’ve both been by ourselves, pretty much, even in the midst of lots of people._

_John… it’s true._

_And it’s hard for us to believe that’s changed at last. We’ve probably both got some old habits to unlearn. If you’ll be patient with mine, I’ll always be patient with yours. Yeah?_

_Yes._

_So in the meantime, let’s do an experiment…_

_…and see how long it takes you to…?_

_How long it takes_ us.

_(nineteen minutes later)_

_Well, now we know!_

Sh’lok regarded him with momentary bemusement. _John, surely you don’t expect me to be satisfied with just_ one _data sample. We must establish a statistically significant baseline._

John chuckled… then went quiet for a moment. _Sh’lok… I have to ask._

_Anything, John._

_Was it like this for you with the Horta?_

Sh’lok glanced down between them, where two erections were pressed together and being stroked gently by a large and capable Vulcan hand. _Like_ this??

 _Uh, well, maybe not like_ this _this. I mean… um…_

Sh’lok’s glance at him was thoughtful, and for the moment the stroking slid into abeyance. _Wait. In terms of the_ intimacy, _you mean._

John shrugged _. I don’t know, I was just kind of hoping that, in terms of, you know,_ this _, I was… your first…_

Along the connection between them flowed a sense of several emotions tightly twined together:  amusement, mild exasperation, and an extravagant tenderness. _Ah… I see it now. John, kindly attend me. You do what not one man in a million can do: command a starship. You are therefore by the most basic definition a being of many accomplishments. Yet there is far more to you. Your bravery and resourcefulness have become a byword in Starfleet. You have shamelessly bluffed more powerful opponents into ignominious defeat and by tactical cleverness or sheer bold exploitation of circumstance have brought overconfident ones to naught. You have blown up computers designed to control whole planets merely by conversing with them. You have single-handedly stopped interplanetary wars and saved millions of beings of numerous species from being exterminated by any number of different threats. Yet none of these challenges have inflated your ego, distorted your personality, or divorced you from the best traits of your humanity. You are adored by your crew and held in high estimation by all right-thinking beings who meet you._

John smiled. _And you, of course, would be a right-thinking being._

 _I would hope to be found so. In any case I am a being who has no trouble perceiving your astonishing worth._ Silver eyes gazed down into John’s. _Daily I see your care for your command, for the people who follow you. Your courage, always ready. Your kind heart. Sometimes your anger, a weapon in your hand. Always, your power. And in your eyes…_ Sh’lok’s unoccupied hand came up to his face, stroking it. _Earth’s seas are in them. Those depths, that danger. But that life, too._ Your _life. You are a world, John._ His thought dropped to a whisper. My _world._ Mine.

And John felt it flowing over him, warm, fierce, inexhaustible… the commitment, the certainty, the loyalty: the love. _The love._ There was no other possible word for it, especially not when you could feel it from inside and directly experience the nature of the emotion, the intensity of it.

He swallowed. His eyes were wet. _Yours._

_And therefore…_

It was taking John a moment to recover from what he saw in those eyes… if in fact recovery was ever going to be possible. He blinked a bit, wiped his eyes. _…Therefore?_

_Therefore, taking all these matters into consideration, I would say it ill befits you to be jealous of a sentient rock._

John couldn’t do anything but shake his head and start giggling as he reached up to brush the curls away from one of those elegant ears. _Even one with exquisite taste?_

The answer was softer laughter, deeper, rumbling between them, as Sh’lok shivered with arousal. _Come here and let me discuss exquisite taste with you in an entirely different paradigm._

_(ninety-four minutes later)_

The act of drifting awake revealed to John that he had finally dozed off a little at last. _Well, after that_ last _one, no wonder,_ he thought. Hormones or no hormones, whatever Sh’lok’s _pon farr_ might have done to his refractory period, his neurochemistry was going to be another matter.

But as he drifted awake, he realised that he wasn’t alone in his mind.

Once this might have shocked and terrified him, but not now. Now he just stretched against that other presence, as he might have stretched against a companioning body in bed, and smiled a lazy smile to find the other rummaging around and sorting and classifying what he found, idly making his way among the contents like a researcher in a museum.

_John?_

_Mmm?_

_Perhaps you would explain this referent to me?_

_Perhaps. What referent?_

_“‘Three Quadrants Watson.’”_

A pause. “What about it?”

A dark chuckle of reaction at one participant of a meld suddenly choosing a slight strategic withdrawal from it. _“Only_ three?”

“Um.” A touch of embarrassment, well seasoned with amusement. “A man can’t be everywhere at once, Sh’lok…”

“That’s not the impression I would have had an hour or so ago.”

A chuckle. “Going to argue with your Captain, are you? That’s insubordination, mister.”

“It is a First Officer’s chief duty to offer useful advice to his superior. And the advice I have for you now is to lie back and let me do _this…”_

“What? What— Oh, God!” _…Oh_ God, _Sh’lok!!_

_I am afraid one of the parties in question does not seem available to answer invocations at the moment. But the other one will be glad to take any messages. Or requests…_

_(one hundred thirty-three minutes later)_

“I’m trying to figure out exactly how to log this,” John said.

Sh’lok glanced around the bed. “This?”

 _“What?_ Oh! No, no. I mean… what happened back on Vulcan.” John shook his head. “Reliving the events in enough detail to satisfy Fleet isn’t going to be pleasant.” He sighed. “Yet… things could have gone so much worse.”

Sh’lok nodded. “Unquestionably. Tragically so. Yet…” He looked thoughtful. “There might have been difficult outcomes that did _not_ involve your death.”

John looked down at Sh’lok in some bemusement. “Such as?”

“Well…”

John pulled Sh’lok closer. “John, do you have any idea…”

“Probably safest to assume ‘no’ and go on from there.”

Sh’lok gave him a look that somehow said both _Don’t steal my line_ s and _It’s adorable when you steal my lines._ “How… I think the word would be… hot. How _hot_ you were. How hot you made me. Even fighting against me.” He reached up to John, and his hand touched his face as a scholar might touch a priceless text bare-handed, illicitly and _lusting_. “So fierce, so sure.”

John laughed at that. “I was anything but sure.”

“But your opponent couldn’t tell. Even deep in the fever I came to understand that you would fight to protect yourself, yet also fight to stop me, and that nothing would stop _you._ Not the air, not the heat, not— It was—” Sh’lok shivered a bit. “It was starting to break the fever, that ferocity of yours. That purpose. A sense was starting to creep in that I was fighting for… the wrong mate.” Sh’lok swallowed. “A little longer— _just_ a little longer—and I think I would have come fully to myself and stepped away, and thrown the _ahn woon_ down.” He looked thoughtful as he said that. “Thereby probably causing the government to fall.”

John looked at him in shock. “Really?”

Sh’lok nodded, somber. “I heard you describe the connection to Lestrade,” he said. “It’s closer than you knew. S’kroft and I are not brothers in the conventional sense; my birth was too engineered a thing. But we _are_ related. He is the Young Father of our House—the son of the head of a most ancient line of which my family’s is a branch. His mother, who’s a great age even for a Vulcan, has denoted him as her heiress—”

John put up an eyebrow, and Sh’lok smiled at his own gesture turned back on him. “Don’t tell me,” John said. “It’s complicated.”

“It _is_ complicated,” Sh’lok said. “But simple. S’kroft is Head-to-be of the greater family of which mine is part, and thereby Clan-brother to all of us in my line. Also, quite by chance, he’s closer to me than almost any Vulcan beyond my immediate family, for his mother took a liking to mine when Sarek took her to wife…”

 Sh’lok smiled a secret sort of smile. “There was a great deal of talk, as you can probably imagine. Among the more conservative sorts of Vulcan, there was muttering along the lines of ‘Yes it’s good to cherish the infinity of diversity in its infinite combinations, but _all_ combinations? Even, you know, with _humans?_ Are you _sure_ Surak meant them too?’”

John snorted down his nose. Sh’lok rolled his eyes. “Quite. Well, S’kroft’s mother is one who delights in flouting all their fossilised proprieties… and as she is directly descended from Surak, no one dares say a word against her. When my mother first came to live on Vulcan, T’Pau visited her to look her over. And to their mutual surprise, they found they liked each other. So T’Pau came often to visit, and when she did, she would bring S’kroft with her, as he was only a few years older than I. He detested me, and I detested him…”

“Really?” John said.

Sh’lok met his eyes, and then had to smile and look away. “For others to see,” he said. “But then Vulcans are not immune to seeing only what they wish to.” Sh’lok made a face. “It’s not to say we don’t find each other, well, challenging. S’kroft is pompous and stiff and besotted of regulations and prim and proper and annoying. Whereas _he_ feels that _I_ am rules-averse and undisciplined and stupid and spoiled and generally irresponsible.”

“Sh’lok,” John said, genuinely shocked. “He thinks you’re _stupid?”_

“As Vulcans go,” Sh’lok said, with some resignation. “And as Vulcans go, unfortunately even I must admit my Clan-brother to be unusually brilliant… a predictive analyst of surpassing skill. That fact, combined with the significant political power he already wields, means that there in the Place of Marriage and Challenge you met possibly the most dangerous being you’ll ever know. Yet plainly he _likes_ you… though the heat death of the universe would occur before he would admit to any such thing. So take the truth of it from me, and be content.”

“I don’t know,” John muttered. “Anyone who calls _you_ stupid—” He gave Sh’lok a warning look. “He and I might have words.”

A second later he was set completely adrift by the look of sober wonder with which Sh’lok was regarding him. “And there you are,” Sh’lok murmured, his eyes gone soft with something unnervingly like adoration. “No sooner do I tell you of his dangerousness than you challenge it. John Watson, moment by moment you undo me. For I have… a bit of a weakness. …For courage.”

John shook his head and looked away, feeling his cheeks heat. “I do what I have to,” he said. “And if in this case that means chinning your brother…”

Sh’lok reached out and touched John’s face again. “My John,” he said softly, so softly, like a man who fears someone will hear him and stop him from saying a thing not to be hoped for, a wish until now never spoken except between dream and waking… yet now somehow impossibly possible in the broad light of day.

Then he pulled back a bit, mastering himself. He cleared his throat. “At any rate,” Sh’lok said. “Had I failed to carry the combat through to its conclusion, and had S’kroft allowed that—by permitting me to live, for the refusal would have been read by the ancient law as cowardice—his position as Young Father would immediately have been called into question. Those in the Clan who’ve long sought to bring him down as unfit to serve would have attacked him thereafter on the grounds that his relationship to me had induced him to allow me unwarranted exemption from the ancient penalties of the _Kal-if-fee._ Shortly thereafter his position in what passes on Vulcan as the world government would have been at risk… if not at an end. So Dr. Lestrade should be told that by his underhanded and ethically suspect stratagem, he singlehandedly prevented a major interstellar crisis that eventually could have cost millions, if not billions, of lives.”

John nodded. Then he smiled a little. “You don’t think he’ll get insufferable about this with you, and start reminding you about it just to get under your skin?”

Sh’lok gave John a humorous look, but it was a little edged with something somber. “Let him. He saved your life, and by so doing, saved mine. I think I can resign myself to taking his teasing meekly… from time to time.”

He reached up to take John’s hand. “For think what’s come of it, John. Before today, I would never have thought that this—” and he stroked his thumb over the back of John’s hand—“this simple feeling… would ever be allowed me in this life.”

“Yet here you are,” John murmured.

Sh’lok nodded. “Here I am. And here you are. …This is perhaps my Maiwand, John. No question, it was terrible. Potentially tragic in a number of ways. Yet it brought me here.” He glanced around at the room: at John. “To you.” He swallowed. “So… I am content.”

John drew him close, touched his face. _My own_ t’hy’la… _so am I._

Sh’lok buried his face in John’s chest. John wrapped his arms around Sh’lok, rested his cheek atop Sh’lok’s head, stroking it against the curls, and closed his eyes.

_(ninety-eight minutes later)_

“How long to Altair now?”

“Twenty-five hours, thirty-seven minutes, fifty-two seconds…”

“Kind of a pity.”

“How so?”

“I sort of hate this to be over. For this little while… no responsibilities. Nothing but here, and now, and us…”

“But John, we have plenty of time yet.”

“Do we really.” A sigh. “Twenty-five hours is looking kind of brief at the moment, even if we do stay awake the whole time. And if we do, we’re going to be wrecked when we get there. Probably fall asleep standing there in the middle of the President’s reception. Well, not _you_ maybe, but _I_ might. People will talk.”

“Oh, I think not.”

“Really. …Wait a minute, I know that look. What have you got up your sleeve?”

“John. My sleeves, at the moment, are on the floor—”

_“Sh’lok.”_

Sh’lok chuckled. “…Well. There are more kinds of relativity than the General one, John. Even Einstein was willing to suggest that a minute spent in the close company of a pretty girl differed considerably from a minute spent with one’s hand on a hot stove—”

“Did he really say that? Thought it was just one of those unproven attributions.”

“There is evidence to support Einstein having dictated that example to his secretary so that she might quote it to the reporters who kept coming to his office seeking interviews and disrupting his workday. In 1929 the New York _Times_ —”

John started running his paired index and middle fingers gently up and down the edge of the pinna of Sh’lok’s right ear. “Sh’lok,” he said. “Relativity as it applies to _us?”_

“Um. Yes.” Sh’lok cleared his throat, then squirmed a little closer. “There are certain Vulcan mind disciplines which can alter the personal perception of the passage of time.” John tilted his head a little to watch him, and kept stroking that ear. “Used correctly and according to best practice… by virtue of these disciplines hours can seem like days… and minutes… like hours...”

Sh’lok’s eyes dropped closed and his head fell back against John’s breastbone. His lips parted, leaving him looking like a man whom words had very much failed.

“Oh really,” John said. “Well, I think we should look into that.” He stretched, pulling Sh’lok down with him, still stroking the one softly flushed ear. “Being very careful to do it by the book, of course…”

 _By the book…_ Sh’lok murmured as John’s other hand slid lower.

_(seventy-four minutes later, ship’s time)_

“John.”

“Sh’lok…” He smiled at his Vulcan. Sh’lok had been stroking his face again, his fingers held in a way that was reminiscent of the mindmeld gesture: almost the Vulcan salute, the fingers parted two and two, but gently curved as he touched John’s cheek with the fingers’ backs. “Tell me.”

“The very first time. When we were… when our minds were most closely joined…”

Recalling that first mindmeld, Sh’lok still sounded abashed through his tenderness. John found the vulnerability, the reticence, profoundly moving. He drew Sh’lok’s face close, lipped at one cheek, then kissed his temple. “Yes?”

“I came across… a most unusual phrase.”

“Oh?”

“Something that perhaps… Lestrade might have said to you? About something you had.”

“Mm?”

“Yes. What exactly is… a ‘danger boner?’”

John’s eyes went wide. Then he started to laugh. “Oh God,” he gasped, “oh God, oh sweet Christ—”

Sh’lok rolled his eyes. “One must assume that Deity when invoked in this modality is unusually patient with its most consistent devotees.”

“Yeah,” John said when he managed to get some breath back. “Has to be, I guess.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well. Now, John. This ‘danger boner’, are we discussing a strictly idiomatic construction or is there actually an anatomical—”

That set John’s giggling off all over again, for Sh’lok’s tone was that of a serious scientific researcher faced with a serious new topic. And the words sounded hilarious coming out of Sh’lok at all. “Guilty,” he said, “guilty as charged.” He had to stop again to breathe. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Everything, I should hope,” Sh’lok murmured.

“For a start,” John said. “Yes.” He smiled. “This is, after all, a five-year mission. Which will allow us plenty of time for…”

“Exploration?”

John snorted. “Need to make sure it doesn’t interfere with the search for new life, though…” 

“Hmm. _This_ has new life in it, I would judge.”

John regarded the item in question and shook his head, and smiled, because Sh’lok was right, as usual. “You’re impossible.”

“Indeed not. For the impossible has thankfully been eliminated… and what remains is therefore the possible: all of it. All that remains to be determined are various degrees of improbability.”

“All of which are in this bed with me _right now.”_

Sh’lok smiled, that wicked smile that John thought he would never, never get tired of. “John. Such flattery. I think.”

“Anyway, for the moment we have at least—”

“Twenty-four hours, twenty-three minutes, fifty-four seconds…”

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said in mock severity, “you’ve begun finishing my sentences for me. I’m told that’s a sign of—” He shrugged. “Something or other.”

Sh’lok smiled at him. _“T’hy’lait,”_ he said, “if nothing else.”

John pulled that long body into his arms and pushed his face into its hair. _Come here,_ said _Enterprise’s_ Captain with a smile, _my_ t’hy’la, _and explain that word to me again._

* * *

Much later, John lay there drowsing with Sh’lok already draped all over him in peaceful slumber—the explanation had been a divinely long one in subjective time—and thought of the various career moments his First Officer had recounted to him earlier. Idly he started to wonder whether he should be writing this stuff up.

 _After all, no career lasts forever. And if nothing blows you up or eats you first, and you make it to retirement age, why not supplement your service pension with the income from the publication of your memoirs?_ And others had done it before. _Why not me?_

It was an idea. _Captain’s log or captain’s blog?_ John thought.

But there was time for that; all the time in the worlds, as long as the man beside him was with him in that life, as in this one. Any other option was simply impossible… and the impossible, so he’d been told, had been eliminated.

Secure in that knowledge, John Watson pulled Sh’lok closer, let his eyes fall shut, and slid gladly into dream.

And around them, in the dream, a starship on course for Altair VI took inventory of the souls within her, found her long-divided heart to finally be whole in itself… then smiled (in the manner of theoretically inanimate objects) and continued on her way across the oldest, longest night.


End file.
